


dig a little deeper

by gly13



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: Blasphemy, Dark Comedy, Debates About Morality, Explicit Language, F/F, Murder, Panic Attacks, Psychological, Recreational Drug Use, Referenced Attempted Sexual Harrassment, Rumours, fun first date idea for you and bae: murdering a misogynist, issues with authority, no one is a good person, please don't read this then murder someone and blame me, please just don't murder people in general, referenced suicide attempt (oc minor character), seriously they're all very bad people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-10 04:17:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20521811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gly13/pseuds/gly13
Summary: "Oh my God! This is so fucking exhausting!"Sooyoung leans on her shovel, panting heavily."Keep digging, or you'll find that I am perfectly capable of burying two bodies on my own," Wendy grits out, with a glint in her eye that says she's not joking.Sooyoung starts digging again.or: what do the most popular girl on campus and that weird social outcast law student have in common?their knowledge of the body they buried together





	dig a little deeper

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is, by request, a dark comedy and, thus, handles some very heavy topics very flippantly so please, please make sure to read through the tags carefully in case you find any of these things upsetting
> 
> i've tagged graphic depictions of violence just to be on the safe side, but it's graphic depictions of a corpse more than anything, but you've been warned nonetheless
> 
> tw// panic attack and attempted sexual harassment (these two are handled seriously and the panic attack is quite in-detail but the harassment is not)
> 
> also like, ive tried to be funny but honestly who knows if it actually is so pls,, just dont judge me too hard
> 
> i also just want to say that i do not condone murder or the behaviour of most of the characters in this fic, but i find writing about subjective morality and its existence very interesting
> 
> also, please bear in mind that this is a work of fiction. the characters in this story may behave poorly or immorally, but if i've used someone's name it means i love their irl counterpart tremendously and this portrayal is not an accurate representation of them
> 
> anyway, a huge thanks to the mods for organising this, it was my first fic fest and i had such a blast <3
> 
> also thank you to my prompter for such a wonderful prompt, i really hope this is the kind of thing you had in mind <33
> 
> [bgm](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5pBDcy1Ob54nXsBHJKjUdV?si=nohgTYv1RcqpEOCWH3r_ZQ)
> 
> enjoy x
> 
> once again, please do not murder people, murder is very very wrong and illegal

**November 1st, 06:07**

They leave the shovels where they found them, thrown haphazardly into the shed and landing with a residual clang that seems to bounce off of Sooyoung’s ears. She doesn’t really hear it.

She doesn’t really feel it, either, as her hand closes around the handle of the car door and she pulls it open. She doesn’t feel the biting cold at her skin or smell the tang of old leather in Wendy’s beat-up, scruffy car even though she’d complained about it relentlessly earlier.

It’s stuffy ‒ at least, it’s meant to be.

Wendy starts the car, and Sooyoung registers the low growl of the engine somewhere at the back of her mind. If it were any other time, she may have laughed at the absurdity of the Bee Gees’ song that starts pounding through the silence of the car. Wendy does, cackling slightly before singing along as she reverses out of where she’s parked.

The radio must hate her, Sooyoung decides. The way it crackles its way through the song as some sick joke from God to mock her.

The journey is bumpy and long and uncomfortable and Sooyoung doesn’t move once. There’s a strange feeling clawing at her gut that she’d be quick to write off as guilt if it weren’t so unfamiliar. Nonetheless, it’s not nice. Which shouldn’t be surprising and kind of feels like a stupid way to describe it. It shouldn’t be a surprise because no one expected murder to feel nice but still, Sooyoung didn’t expect it to be like _ this _ either.

They don’t say anything for the rest of the ride, but Wendy fills the quiet with her singing. She’s a good singer, Sooyoung thinks, even if Sooyoung has a newfound hatred for the Bee Gees and their entire discography and wants the song to be over more than anything. Seriously, how long is this song?

They pull up, tyres working fiercely against the grass. It’s dark and cold, but the small metal lighter in her jacket pocket weighs hot and heavy.

Wendy waits for the song to finally finish, her voice chiming in just above the track.

“_ Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me yeah _ ,” the car slows down. “ _ I’m stayin’ alive _.”

The car stops and Wendy kills the engine.

**___**

**November 1st, 07:02**

The next time they clamber into the car, the load in the trunk is lighter and their clothes stink of smoke. The hem of Sooyoung’s skirt is lined with ash and sweat sticks her hair to her forehead.

Wendy turns the engine back on, and the radio revives with it. It’s still the Bee Gees and the scowl that forms on Sooyoung’s face is more anger at the universe’s sense of humour than anything else. A tragedy, indeed.

Wendy sings along with it again, as though she can’t see the singes on her clothes, can’t smell the pungent, hazy stench.

The sun is visible just over the horizon now, and Sooyoung would think it was pretty if it didn’t remind her of fire. She looks away, trains her eyes on Wendy instead.

Wendy’s grip on the steering wheel is loose, and she’s moving along to the beat of the song in her seat. Distantly, the normal part of Sooyoung’s brain wonders what station Wendy has to be listening to, to get this music and how the hell she knows all the words. The normal part of her brain weighs it against the rumours she’s heard about Wendy before, and they don’t really fit, but Wendy’s entire personality seems mismatched and contradictory. Nothing about her adds up. Although, all the rumours do have one thing in common: Wendy’s weird. She’s… abnormal, removed from society.

Sooyoung supposes that’s in line with knowing all the words to apparently every Bee Gees’ song.

They’re returning to the city now, and the smell seems to have dissipated, left behind to linger in the air of their newfound secret. They return to civilisation without it ‒ without many things, Sooyoung thinks bitterly.

People are still staggering around the streets and Sooyoung’s heart aches with envy that she isn’t one of them. Her Halloween costume is hanging on the door of her wardrobe and, under Wendy’s instruction, she’s supposed to take it and make it look worn in, convince her friends she’s been jumping around from party to party all night like she normally would have been.

She doesn’t really want to be sober right now, she decides. So maybe her drinking herself into passing out won’t be a lie. In fact, that’s what she’ll be doing the minute she gets home. It would certainly make this stupid ‘plan’ more believable ‒ drinking herself into a comatose state. The only unusual part would be her waking up in her own bed.

It’s quieter now than it was when they left, but there are empty beer cans and silly string and what Sooyoung’s half-sure is the skeleton from the biology department strewn across the ground. It’s cracked across the skull and Sooyoung flinches when she sees it, turning away so quickly her neck clicks. Wendy raises an eyebrow at her in a silent question, looking amused. Sooyoung shakes her head, looking back at the dashboard of the car.

ABBA’s playing now. Sooyoung briefly wonders if Wendy listens exclusively to shitty bands from the ’70s but then the song’s finished and Wendy’s fiddling with the dial. It switches to some British rap song Sooyoung’s heard Jooheon listen to.

They’ve spent the entire night together now, and Sooyoung understands Wendy even less than she did at the beginning. She’s confusing, is Sooyoung’s final conclusion, as she stares at Wendy rapping along easily, taking the car through back alleys that Sooyoung didn’t know existed to get to her apartment. The rational part of Sooyoung’s brain tells her that she shouldn’t want to decipher Wendy and who she is, she shouldn’t want to unravel this ball of mysteries wound up in weird music taste and rumours about throwing toasters at people.

But, after tonight, she’s not sure if the rational part of her brain will ever win again.

They stop a couple of streets away from Sooyoung’s apartment, and Wendy mutes the radio. Without music filling the space, the car seems bigger, emptier.

Wendy turns to face her, and Sooyoung works hard to meet her gaze.

“Okay,” she says, her voice too loud, “after you get out of this car, we never speak to each other again. We don’t interact and this never happened. Got it?”

“I’m not an idiot, Freak,” Sooyoung huffs. Though, after tonight, she’s not sure that’s entirely true anymore.

Wendy smirks. “Sure you’re not, Princess.”

Sooyoung rolls her eyes and turns to open the car door. She climbs out, the cold of the early morning hitting her square in the chest. She shuts the door with enough force for a loud _ thud _ to echo in the space around her. The car leaves and Sooyoung’s left standing by herself. And just like that, she’s back to her normal self.

Who’s Wendy? Time for a drink.

**___**

**November 3rd**

They don’t even manage to last a whole two days.

Sooyoung’s had the weekend to mull it over, stew in the reality of what she’d done, drown herself in cheap vodka she found at the back of one of her cupboards. Yerim had come in at one point, as Sooyoung had been nursing her very real hangover she’d gotten from the very fictional parties she’d attended, and they’d had probably the most awkward and stifling conversation of their existence.

She’d blamed it on the hangover, but she was sure Yerim could tell she was lying. Friends since first grade don’t just suddenly have problems talking to each other. Not unless one of them has changed beyond belief. Not unless one of them had done something to warrant such change: like lost their virginity when they’re both devout Catholics, eloped overnight, or something equally ridiculous like murdering a man.

Getting ready for her literature elective Monday afternoon feels like a special kind of torture.

_ They’ll know, _ is all she thinks as she gets dressed. _ They’ll see my face and they’ll know, _ and it’s a completely ludicrous thought but it plays on repeat as she gets ready. Luckily, Yerim’s already out at her 11am so Sooyoung has, at the very least, dodged that bullet.

She goes through the motions she usually goes through; she straightens her hair and does her make-up (though she uses more concealer under her eyes than she usually does); she picks an outfit from her colour-coordinated wardrobe. It’s all very ritualistic, and she relies more on muscle memory to pull her around the apartment than any actual conscious thought.

She doesn’t eat breakfast. Doesn’t even entertain the idea for a moment.

She’s almost out the door when her phone _ pings _ with the obnoxious tone she set for her university email. It’s a horrible, high-pitched noise and it startles her in the quiet of the apartment, as though an email notification could somehow be a warning that _ someone knows _ and the police are on their way to get her. It’s a ridiculous thought, though rather fitting for what a ridiculous situation she’s got herself into.

She stands in the doorway as she checks her phone. It unlocks with her fingerprint and then tumbles out of her grip upon opening the email. It lands against the wooden floorboards with a horrible noise and she crouches with a grimace to pick it up, willing her heart to stop hammering so loudly, scared that someone will hear and it will give her away.

A precursory scan of the email sends her brain into panic. All red flashing lights and disjointed thoughts and hurriedly-made plans to fake her own death and move to Canada.

A second, more in-depth reading calms her slightly. Not much. But enough for her to abandon her Canada plans.

_ Professor Miller has been reported missing. If you have any information concerning his whereabouts, please inform either the police or a member of the university faculty. _

_ All students will be interviewed by the police in order to try and find Professor Miller. Rest assured, the campus is safe and you are not being accused of anything. This is merely precautionary protocol. _

The idea of the campus being safe is far-fetched, Sooyoung thinks. Not when two murderers roam freely. Safe for her and Wendy, she supposes; they’re at the top of the food chain: the most dangerous on campus. She scoffs at the thought.

Still, interviews weren’t good.

She could barely act normal around her best friend, let alone a police officer trained to sniff out bullshit. Panic clutches at her chest, fear swims in her gut and her grip on her phone tightens until her knuckles are nearly white.

The door slams loudly behind her as she scurries down the hallway.

Out in the cold afternoon air of late autumn, Sooyoung feels lost. She had near-ran from her apartment as though putting distance between herself and her home would put distance between herself and the guilt along with it. Not her smartest idea, as the guilt carried with her so that she just looks delusional, standing in the middle of campus with no clue where to go and her head spinning.

The sun is bright but cold but she can barely feel it – not with the way guilt builds like a fire in her chest and spreads to her limbs with all the speed of light in a vacuum, not with the way it pounds at her head, threatens to make it implode.

People keep trying to talk to her, some of them even ones that she’d usually make an effort with, but she can’t find it in herself to muster up more than a smile and hurried “sorry, I’m late for lecture,” before walking off somewhere. She’s not even heading towards her lecture hall at this point because she cannot imagine anything worse than getting there only to be met with an empty hall and a notice about make-up assignments.

She’s at the back of one of the blocks. She’s not sure which department it’s for, only that there’s no one else around and that’s good enough for her. She stops, masked in shadow, and leans against the side of one of the buildings, as though she can shift some of the fire to the bricks.

It’s then that she hears laughter, and she pulls herself up straight, even as she sways slightly on her feet. She recognises that laugh, even if she can’t pin it, and the idea of someone she knows finding her having a breakdown in public is possibly more mortifying than being caught for murder.

The sound isn’t coming any closer, though. And, listening deeper, there are two voices, both speaking lightly and laughing.

It’s after one particularly menacing cackle that it clicks. Wendy.

And she heads towards the voices without a second thought.

The smell hits her first. Musky, pungent, and herbal. It shouldn’t surprise her that Wendy spends her afternoons smoking around the back of buildings, but it does anyway. She’s sitting there, just on the ground, next to someone Sooyoung doesn’t know.

“Wendy,” she says.

Wendy takes one more hit before looking up at Sooyoung. Her expression is a difficult one to decipher: she’s too high for any real distinct emotion but not high enough to mask the surprise that overcomes her. She takes a quick look at the girl sitting beside her before levelling Sooyoung with a look.

“Can I help you?”

Sooyoung almost tuts, but then her phone _ pings _ again – that same horrible sound and she’s pulled back into that whirlwind of panic, too much to care about rudeness or whatever.

“I need to talk to you. About-” Sooyoung chances a look at Wendy’s friend, who looks too far gone to comprehend anything anyone’s saying. “About Halloween.”

Wendy rolls her eyes, and it’s then Sooyoung notices just how red they are.

“Listen, Park, I really don’t get why you want to talk to me.”

“Because,” and Sooyoung is overly aware of the presence of Wendy’s friend, “I think people might know.”

“Literally how?” Wendy drawls.

Sooyoung feels her expression morph into one of exasperation.

“Did you not see the email?”

“Yes, I did. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Hence why I am currently spending time with my friend instead of running around campus like a maniac and having nonsensical conversations.” Wendy sounds wholly too sober, wholly too unbothered.

“What about the interviews? You’re not worried about them?”

“Why would I be?” Wendy raises an eyebrow. “It’s not like I have anything to hide. And you shouldn’t either, unless you have something to tell me, Princess?” She bites out that last word, a challenge to her voice and in her eyes that Sooyoung almost wants to rise to. But then rationality and fear outweigh pride and she settles for the most menacing glare she can. 

Wendy just smirks. And somehow that’s more irritating to Sooyoung than anything else she’s said.

“Fuck off now, Princess.” Wendy takes the blunt back from her friend. “Go to your lecture and stop looking for advice about stupid things from people you don’t know,” she says, entirely too pointedly to be subtle. “Don’t want to keep the professor waiting.”

Sooyoung doesn’t dignify that with a response, doesn’t even dignify it with a glare or flipping Wendy off. Instead, she turns on her heel and heads to her lecture. Not because Wendy told her to, though. Just because that’s where she needs to be.

There’s reassurance to be had, she supposes. Even if Wendy had been incredibly rude, there’s reassurance to be found in Wendy’s indifference. And, even though it pains her to admit it, Wendy was right: they shouldn’t be scared. That will make it too easy. They covered their tracks well enough. She’ll be fine.

And, with this reassurance, her confidence begins to filter back into her. Each of her steps are more powerful, her face is schooled into something cold and bitchy, and people automatically to make a path for her as she moves through the corridors of the literature block. It’s easy to fall back into her normal personna, flashing obviously fake smiles at people who call out her name.

The door to the lecture hall is open, which surprises her, but she’s careful to not let it show on her face. She’d expected to see a notice or something pinned to the door to tell her the lecture had been cancelled and that they’d all be emailed about the university’s plan for them.

She enters anyway, despite her confusion, and finds her seat amongst her classmates. Taking out her laptop and resting her chin on the back of her hand, her eyes search the front of the hall for some indication as to what will happen next.

Inexplicably, like some sort of cruel, ironic magnet, her gaze is pulled to the name plaque sitting on the desk at the front, and some of that reassurance is stripped away.

_ Prof. R. Miller _

**___**

**October 31st, 18:56**

_ From: Prof. R. Miller ‒ Re: Extra Credit _

Sooyoung sighs, letting her make-up brush fall into her bathroom sink. It clatters, the noise of plastic against ceramic mixing in with the bass of the song sounding through her speakers.

Her phone unlocks with her fingerprint, and the email flashes up.

_ I’d be happy to allow you to make up your grade, Sooyoung. Just come down to my office some time this evening and I’ll talk you through what I’d like you to do. _

Her head tilts back with another sigh and she checks the time, weighing up her options before thinking _ fuck it _ and making her way to the door of her bathroom. She still has a few hours before she _ needs _ to be ready and she honestly really does need this extra credit. It’s not her fault Yerim pulled tickets for a rave and Sooyoung had put self-care (moping in bed with the worst hangover of her life) over attending her literature assessment.

She leaves her hoodie on and her hair in a bun, only grabbing her keys and phone before slipping on her shoes.

“I’ll be back in like half an hour,” she calls to Yerim. “Got to go see Prof. Miller about a make-up assignment.”

She receives a vague noise of recognition back, barely audible over the music, before the apartment door swings shut behind her.

**___**

**November 3rd**

The door to the lecture hall slams shut with a sound that reverberates through the large space. Sooyoung pulls her eyes away from the name plaque and shakes her head, trying to focus back on reality.

There’s a man she doesn’t recognise standing at the front. He lifts a brown, leather briefcase onto the desk, knocking against the name plaque slightly as he does so ‒ just enough to turn it on its side. He leafs through the sheets of paper inside the case, squinting at them through his glasses. When he seems to have found the right one, he places the others down on the desk and turns to face them.

“Hello, class, I am Professor Smith and I will be taking over as your lecturer until such time that Professor Miller is able to resume his position.”

Something lurches in Sooyoung’s stomach.

There’s something terrifying about how Miller has been replaced so quickly. Something so horribly unsettling about watching a substitute sit in Miller’s chair and call out her fellow students’ names as though he’s their actual lecturer. He sets up his laptop, links it to the projector and talks them through Professor Miller’s presentation as though he’d made the slides himself.

There’s just something disconcerting about how easily Miller has been replaced. As though he’d never existed in the first place.

There’s just some part of Sooyoung that’s scared of how easily life has continued even with such a notable figure in her life missing. There’s a part of Sooyoung that’s relieved that no one seems all too bothered about his disappearance. But there’s also that part ‒ the selfish part, the one that preoccupies most of her mind ‒ that’s worried about what this means for her own life.

She shakes the thoughts from her head.

Her fingers find the keys of her laptop easily, and she begins to take notes. She lets whatever Smith is saying be transcribed onto a Google Doc through muscle memory alone because, try as she might, she just can’t stop thinking about how Professor Miller had a very similar jacket to the one Smith is wearing, or how Miller never used his laser pointer as liberally as Smith is. They’re stupid, small things to think about, but they overtake her brain with all the force of a tidal wave.

She’s staring at him, more than would be considered normal, but she can’t pull her eyes away. It’s a familiar sensation, even if she wishes it weren’t.

But it’s when Smith turns around to face the board and the crown of his head is displayed, greying hair catching the light, that Sooyoung feels the pit in her stomach grow to swallow all of her insides.

**___**

**October 31st, 19:31**

It’s dark and Sooyoung is grateful for it.

Grateful for the way she’s not quite able to see what she knows is there. Grateful that she can’t see brown hairs matted together with a thick, red liquid. Grateful that she can’t see it spilt onto the wooden floor and the broken shards of ceramic that surround it. Grateful that she can’t see the dark patch in the centre of his skull.

Grateful for the darkness.

**___**

**November 3rd**

Sooyoung’s fingers still over her keyboard, and Smith’s voice is lost to the air around her ears; she doesn’t process a thing he’s saying.

It’s hard to, when her ears are filled with the sounds of a body clattering down a staircase and her eyes completely ignore the lecture hall right in front of her and instead replace her sight with that dark, dark office from a few nights ago but now it’s light enough to see all that she couldn’t before.

White light reflects off of the red.

The image sticks in the forefront of her mind, paints itself onto the backs of her eyelids so that she’s forced back into that one moment. Forced back to live in it even as the lecture hall moves around her.

Wait. Moving. People are moving.

That jolts her back into the present, scrambling to pack her things into her bag and escape the room before anyone can smell the guilt she’s radiating.

Smith finishes off whatever he was saying and then people are moving towards the door and Sooyoung silently blesses autosave when she shuts her laptop with too much force. She lets it drop into her bag as she stands up and begins her descent down the stairs.

She pushes through the crowd with her head down. She doesn’t turn back; she’s too scared of what she’ll see.

**___**

**November 1st, 05:13**

Surprisingly, it’s much more difficult to re-fill the pit than it was to actually dig it.

For some, inexplicable reason, it’s so much more difficult to shovel dirt back into the gaping hole in the ground than it was to remove it from its rightful place in the earth in the first place. Knowing what’s beneath it ‒ what they’re burying in more ways than one ‒ makes it so much more difficult.

Sweat breaks out of every pore Sooyoung has and she can practically feel her body create new ones. She doesn’t stop for a moment, though. She can’t. It’s something like obsession that pushes her to continue layering mounds of soil into the pit. It’s something like wanting it to be over as quickly as possible, to escape from this dark place and get into warmth.

The lighter suddenly burns against her skin in her back pocket.

Wendy, next to her, is humming a song. It comes out breathy, with how hard she’s panting. Her grip around her shovel is tight but, other than that, she seems unbothered. She fills the hole in the ground with something scarily close to practised ease and it’s all Sooyoung can do to beg her mind not to dwell on it.

They didn’t dig too deep ‒ didn’t need to ‒ so the pit fills rapidly, piling up until it’s the same depth as it was before they’d even picked up their shovels.

It’s uncanny, how similar it looks to before. It’s so uncanny that Sooyoung freezes, her shovel holding the last of the dirt just above the pit, not emptying it and letting it be over with.

It’s uncanny because Sooyoung _ knows _it’s different. She knows what lies under that pile of fresh dirt. And she knows that as soon as she tips her shovel upside down, dirt will fall and with it the final traces of the man that used to teach her literature every Monday and Thursday will be handed over to the worms.

It’s either guilt or fear that keeps her shovel hovering in the air, right way up.

Wendy clears her throat. “What are you waiting for? An invitation?”

Sooyoung shoots her a glare, tipping the shovel upside down to let the dirt cascade down in a movement that feels wholly anticlimactic.

And just like that, it’s done.

Time passes as she stares at it. At the lumps of dirt that she knows are brown but just appear a dark grey in the early morning light. Everything’s seeming grey right now.

Wendy doesn’t interrupt her as she stares, for once. Maybe she’s finally understood a little tact, maybe she’s looking at it with the same aching realisation as Sooyoung that this is _ real _, or maybe she’s gazing at it with the same fascination with which an artist would gaze upon their masterpiece.

Whatever the reason, Sooyoung’s grateful for the silence.

It’s a sobering, painfully long moment. It drags itself out until Sooyoung’s not entirely sure how long she’s been just staring at dirt. Dirt with so much hidden beneath it. Dirt, just dirt. It’s just dirt but she can’t pull her eyes away.

Dirt.

A few more moments ‒ maybe minutes, even ‒ pass before she takes a deep breath, almost choking on the smell as she fully comes back into reality, and lifts her head up.

Wendy’s not staring at the dirt. Instead, she’s leaning on the handle of her shovel and her eyes are fixed on Sooyoung herself and Sooyoung has never had a problem with people looking at her ‒ usually revels in it, even ‒ but Wendy’s gaze is piercing, makes her feel self-conscious and awkward in her own body. There’s something sharp to it, a multitude of emotions Sooyoung can’t decipher. Pity, maybe. Amusement, perhaps. Awe? Something else, definitely.

“Ready to go?” Wendy asks, like she actually cares about the answer.

Sooyoung’s eyes find the dirt again, but she nods anyway. 

They make their way back to the shed and throw the shovels in there without much care. Wendy’s eyes stay fixed ahead of them as they walk back out to the car, determined and resolute.

Sooyoung’s keep flitting back to the dirt, no matter how hard she tries to stop them.

**___**

**November 3rd**

She’s walking too quickly again, her confidence dissipated and the phantom stench of dirt filling her nose. People still make way for her as she moves through the hallways but she doesn’t spare them a glance ‒ couldn’t even if she wanted to, not when all she can see is dirt.

Her feet take her somewhere by themselves, as her brain is out of commission. They take her back the route she took this morning, out of the way and searching for the one person who might be able to understand what she’s feeling, even if it’s a long-shot.

The smell of weed lingers delicately in the air and she follows it to where Wendy is sat now, thankfully, alone. Wendy looks up and something like exasperation takes over her face before it’s exchanged for something far too entertained.

“Well, hello there, Princess,” she says, voice alive with mirth, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

When Sooyoung doesn’t say anything, Wendy’s somehow becomes more mocking.

“You didn’t actually, did you? Professor Miller wasn’t waiting for you at your lecture, was he?”

“No,” Sooyoung manages to get out, the sarcasm that she would normally catch easily flying right over her head.

“Jesus, you’re really out of it today, aren’t you? What’s wrong with you?”

“We murdered someone,” Sooyoung deadpans, because it’s the singular thought that’s been ringing loudly in her mind for the past few minutes and thusly the only thing she can say aloud.

“Okay well say it louder, why don’t you? I don’t think the people on the other side of campus quite heard you?” 

“We murdered someone-”

“I didn’t mean it literally; what the fuck is wrong with-”

“But you’re fine.” Wendy, for once in her life, shuts her mouth and looks at Sooyoung, surprised. “We murdered someone and you’re making jokes about it.”

They stare at each other for a moment, eyes locked. It’s like a shitty stand-off that’s building up to nothing as they’re both painfully unaware of what to say.

A beat passes. And then another.

“How was your lecture?”

“What,” Sooyoung startles, incredulous.

“How was your lecture?” Wendy says again, her words flippant but there’s something intense to her eyes, like she’s some puppet master pulling Sooyoung along. And Sooyoung is either very curious or very easily manipulated.

“It was fine.”

“It wasn’t cancelled?”

“No, we had a supply.”

“And, no riots? Or crying? Or grief of any kind?”

“No.”

Wendy crosses her arms across her chest, a smugness to her smile that Sooyoung hates.

“If no one else cares,” she says, like she’s speaking to someone very stupid, “then why should we?”

“Because they didn’t kill him. We did.”

Wendy shrugs. “So what? They don’t know that. Guilt is what gets people caught, Sooyoung.”

“But _ why _?” Sooyoung hates the desperation in her own voice. “Why don’t they care? How can they not? Why don’t you? Why don’t you feel guilt? Why does no one else care that someone is dead?”

Wendy’s eyes widen.

“Ah,” she says, voice too knowing when Sooyoung is so confused, “so that’s what this is about.” Wendy takes a deep breath. “No one cares because he wasn’t important to anyone else’s life. He was, for the most part, irrelevant, replaceable. See, Princess, life moves on and no one cares.”

“They didn’t even cancel class.” Sooyoung’s voice is so very small now, barely audible. She can feel Wendy’s eyes on her, but refuses to look up and be forced to try and dismantle the puzzle that is Wendy’s face.

“Why would they?” There’s something close to attempted comfort in Wendy’s words that feels so very out of place. “They don’t even know he’s dead. No one will miss him; some people are probably happy that he’s gone. That’s how the world works. Don’t waste your time wondering if people would miss you, Princess. Just be grateful you don’t have to find out.”

Sooyoung looks back up, quick enough to see Wendy quickly disguise blatant concern as something indifferent.

There’s truth in Wendy’s words. Something settling, grounding. They’re not positive by any definition of the word but they’re not exactly negative either. They exist in this weird, blurry grey area that Sooyoung’s learnt Wendy operates in for the majority of the time.

“Why don’t _ you _ care?”

Wendy chuckles slightly, looking somewhere beyond Sooyoung’s eyes.

“I knew the both of you by name and rumour only. That was enough for me to decide which of you I’d rather have ended up at the bottom of that pit.”

All the rumours Sooyoung’s ever heard about herself ‒ both true and untrue ‒ spiral through her mind. And, for the first time, she’s grateful for them, no matter what light they paint her in.

“And that’s enough for you?”

Wendy shrugs.

Sooyoung’s still confused, and she’s opening her mouth to ask more questions, because everything Wendy says creates far more than it answers, and Sooyoung’s still swimming in guilt but then she hears footsteps and her mouth snaps shut before any noise can escape.

“Sooyoung?”

It’s all Sooyoung can do not to curse and plaster on a smile as she spins around, ignoring how Wendy poorly disguises her laughter as a cough.

“Krystal!” she greets, as happily as she can manage.

Sooyoung sees Krystal’s eyes fall to where she knows Wendy is sat behind her before they focus back on Sooyoung, a question in her eyes.

“Thought I’d take a shortcut,” Sooyoung offers, by way of an explanation and Krystal seems to buy it. “Lunch?”

It’s almost too easy to slip back into her usual personna. To block out the guilt and questions even as they claw at the outside of her skull. Wendy stifles a snort when Sooyoung turns her back to her and links her arm through Krystal’s. It’s so easy Sooyoung is almost scared of herself.

She blocks that out, too.

She and Krystal walk arm-in-arm to a nearby café, through the cold sunlight of early November, talking about something shallow that neither of them actually care about. The conversation, inevitably but still unwelcomely, shifts to Halloween and Sooyoung hopes Krystal can’t feel the way she tenses.

“I didn’t see you,” Krystal pouts.

“We must’ve just missed each other,” Sooyoung says, like she’s reading off a teleprompter, “I was party-hopping all night.”

Krystal doesn’t seem to find anything off with it; it’s not like she really would have been looking for Sooyoung anyway, even if she had been there. But luckily, that’s all she has to say on the subject as Krystal begins recounting her night, pulling up pictures to show her and Sooyoung feels a stab of longing as she looks at all these photos of people she knows getting wasted and having fun while she was busy burying a body with the weird girl who smokes weed by herself round the back of the science buildings.

They pass by the faculty offices, and Krystal’s voice trails off when she notices how Sooyoung isn’t listening to a word. Instead, Sooyoung’s eyes are glued to where uniformed police officers stand outside the office building, talking amongst themselves and generally looking unthreatening. It doesn’t stop Sooyoung from feeling wholly scared and threatened.

She knows that staring at them like this is just asking for one of them to notice her, to see her and _ know _ but she can’t pull her eyes away. There’s some sick force (god, probably) that keeps her eyes fixed to them.

Krystal follows her line of sight, and the pair of them stop walking.

“Stupid, isn’t it?” Krystal sighs. “How much fuss there is over Miller, as though everyone doesn’t know he just took all his money and disappeared. These interviews are ridiculous, too. Taking every single student and grilling them about Miller like anyone is gonna remember anything.”

“Yeah,” Sooyoung says, pulling her eyes away. “Ridiculous.”

_ Life moves on, no one cares. _

**___**

**November 6th**

Wendy enters the room and is instantly struck by how cold it is. Fitting, she thinks, as her gaze falls to where Detective Bae is standing, on one side of a metal table. Wendy sits herself on the chair across from her.

Joohyun is as striking as ever, long brown hair pulled into a high ponytail and her uniform crisp, not even a single crinkle. She stands tall, despite her being around the same height as Wendy. She doesn’t need height to be intimidating, though; her face does that all by itself. Effortlessly terrifying: all Wendy’s ever aspired to be in life.

Wendy fixes a grin to her face, and feels it grow when Joohyun’s scowl deepens.

“I’d like to say it’s nice to see you, Wendy, but I’d be lying.”

There’s something scathing to Joohyun’s voice and Wendy revels in it.

“Well, I’m not lying,” Wendy says, lying through her teeth. “It’s nice to see you again, Detective Bae.”

**___**

**November 6th**

The room is cold, but Sooyoung’s thankful for it. She’s hoping the police woman ‒ Detective Bae ‒ will write her shaking off as shivering rather than anxiety. She’s sat rigidly straight in an uncomfortable metal chair and trying not to squirm under Detective Bae’s piercing stare.

“So, Sooyoung, you are a student in Professor Miller’s class, correct?” It’s the first thing Detective Bae has said since Sooyoung entered the room, besides an introduction, and she hates how clinical it all is.

She nods.

“Please speak, Sooyoung. For the record.”

Sooyoung gulps. She doesn’t like how Detective Bae keeps saying her name. “Yeah, I have literature with him every Monday and Thursday.”

She has to keep reminding herself to speak about him in present tense. She has to keep reminding herself that she shouldn’t know he’s dead in a grave that she helped to dig.

“And you went to see him the night he went missing?”

Sooyoung stops herself from letting the shock and fear she feels take over her face. Of course they know; they have access to his emails. But, as far as they know, nothing happened.

“Yeah, I went to see him about a make-up assignment for his class.”

“I didn’t say which night he went missing.”

Fuck.

_ Fuck. _

Detective Bae raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow at her and Sooyoung’s convinced that that must be the first sign of the apocalyse because _ fuck _. Her mind is in absolute shambles and she’s scrambling around for something to say that won’t implicate her because this is a really, really shitty hurdle to trip up at. It’s the first one and she’s already basically confessed. May as well just give in now and spill everything because she’s royally fucked this one up.

Wait.

Her brain boots back in, stopping mid-meltdown.

“Well, I’ve only been to see him once in the last week outside of class so I just assumed you meant then.” She feigns annoyance even though all she actually feels is relief.

Detective Bae has something like mirth behind her eyes, but she relents and sits down nonetheless.

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

**___**

**November 1st, 03:02**

Lifeless.

It seems like a pretty redundant and self-explanatory way to describe a corpse but Sooyoung, staring at the body of Professor Miller several feet beneath her, can’t think of a single other word to capture how it looks.

Lifeless.

If Sooyoung were to get observational about it, she’d see how his mouth hangs open in an unfinished, silent scream. She’d see how his eyes are dull, how they don’t reflect light but still seem to look right through her. She’d see how his arms lay in the dirt like dead weights, holding him down, at his sides. She’d see how his balding head is littered with flecks of filth and matted together with blood.

But, as it stands, all Sooyoung can manage to think is how utterly devoid of life he looks. Dead and not coming back. Lifeless.

It’s an unfairly accurate way to describe a corpse even though it can’t capture the magnitude of it at all.

Lifeless.

**___**

**November 6th**

“Yes.”

**___**

**November 6th**

“What did you do the night of October 31st?”

It’s so like Joohyun to forgo pleasantries and get straight into it.

“What any college student does on Halloween,” Wendy says, like the answer’s obvious. “Stayed at home alone and marathoned horror movies.”

Joohyun doesn’t find her funny, though that’s hardly a surprise.

“Is there anyone who can confirm that?”

“Nope,” Wendy pops the _ p _, if only to piss Joohyun off further. “As I said, I was alone.”

“How well did you know Professor Miller?”

Wendy almost laughs at the attempt to catch her out. “I don’t know him very well at all, Detective. Never had a single class with him, only know him by name.”

Joohyun writes something in her notepad. Wendy leans forward in her seat, resting her chin on the backs of her hands.

“Is watching movies all you did all night?”

Wendy pretends to think. “No,” she hums. “I did some cleaning around ten-ish.”

**___**

**October 31st, 21:49**

“Oh, for fucks sake! Why won’t this blood come out?”

Wendy’s scrubbing relentlessly at the wooden flooring with a cloth drenched in bleach, but red still stains the planks. She sits back on her heels for a second, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her forearm and panting.

“Park,” she calls, “have you made any progress at all?”

She turns her head to where Sooyoung is knelt on the floor, angrily rubbing at it with her own cloth and swearing violently under her breath. It’s certainly a sight, Wendy thinks. The princess of SMU crouched on the floor, make-up half-done and not all there. It’s not a bad sight.

Wendy turns back to the pool of blood she’s supposed to be cleaning and sighs.

**___**

**November 6th**

“See, you say that you were jumping from party to party all night, but we have CCTV footage of you at a convenience store at nine thirty.”

“Yes,” Sooyoung says, slowly; it’s the same tone she uses when she wants to patronise someone and, judging from the frown that digs into Detective Bae’s face, it’s working, “I was buying alcohol. Do you need me to find the receipt?”

**___**

**October 31st, 21:36**

Sooyoung walks into the shop, the white light hitting her eyes harshly. An automated noise rings out as the door opens but the cashier at the register doesn’t even look up from their phone to spare her a glance.

She walks the isles, trying not to let her nerves show too obviously even though she highly doubts the cashier will care. It’s easy enough to find the alcohol, where it’s arranged in what were probably once neat lines on shelves at the back of the store. Now it’s disorganised, ransacked by college students wanting to fuel their Halloween parties.

She surveys the selection, pretending like she’s browsing when in reality she’s silently praying that they’re stocking what she’s looking for.

She almost squeals when she spots it, untouched on the bottom shelf._ Everclear. _ The feeling that floods through her is akin to how she’d imagine it feels to see an oasis after wondering the desert for a year and her fingers clasp around the bottle tightly as though someone else may suddenly scoop it up from right beneath her nose.

She picks up as many as she can carry, piling them into her arms. Momentarily, she thanks the state’s senator for not making the drink illegal in this state. Walking up to the register is an experience, and there’s worry nagging at her, warning her that this is dangerous and that the cashier is going to find her suspicious.

The cashier couldn’t seem to care less.

He scans one single bottle of Everclear ten times before asking, “Would you like a bag?” and Sooyoung nods. He lets out a sigh like she’s just insulted his ancestors and pulls out a plastic bag from beneath the counter and tosses the bottles in without a care for the fact that they are made of glass and glass is notoriously fragile.

And, maybe, Sooyoung would’ve normally gone full-bitch at him but she just cannot find it in herself to care. The cashier doesn’t _ know _ that the spirit is going to be used to cover up a murder, but Sooyoung can’t help but think the bottles probably deserve to be treated this way, nonetheless.

She pays with her own card, hating how much money she’s losing because of this murder.

“Thanks,” she says when he’s finished, lifting the bag off the counter and trying not to wince at how heavy it is. He doesn’t give any indication he’s heard her so she turns to leave. It’s probably for the best; she somewhat doubts he’d be able to pick her out of a line-up if worse came to worst.

**___**

**November 6th**

Detective Bae frowns at her. “Everclear?” she reads off of her notepad. “Strange choice.”

“Gets you there very quickly,” Sooyoung shrugs with forced casualty. “It’s typically what I look for in a drink.”

“You weren’t hosting your own party, though? You said you were just going to others’?”

“Do you not bring drinks when you go to someone’s party?” Sooyoung asks, raising her eyebrows as though she’s incredulous. “What kind of guest…” she adds, under her breath but loud enough for Detective Bae to hear.

Detective Bae scowls and pride flutters through Sooyoung before she remembers that insinuating Detective Bae was an ill-mannered party guest was probably not the smartest thing to have said to a police officer and suddenly it’s swamped out by fear.

“Around what time did you arrive at home?”

“About seven.”

“And where were you around six in the morning?”

**___**

**November 1st, 06:14**

Fire. Bright and hot.

It cuts through the darkness of the night like uncontrolled rage. The stench of burning ethanol sinks into Sooyoung’s nose. Bright flames roar loudly, crackling and impossibly hot.

Smoke is released into the air: thick and grey and dark. It blends in with the night, mixes with the air until Sooyoung’s breathing it in and choking on it.

Wendy hits her palm on Sooyoung’s back and, in the brief moment Sooyoung maintains eye contact with her, she can see the flames dance in Wendy’s eyes like they’re far too at home.

She doesn’t want to think about what this fire means, about how it’s their last stop of the night, about what they’re burning. Empty bottles of Everclear litter the ground around them, reflecting the light of the fire in a way that makes it seem as though the flames are encased within them.

She doesn’t want to think about what this fire means for her, for her life, for the person she’s become tonight. 

So she doesn’t.

Instead, she just stares. She stares at the fire. Fire. Bright and hot.

**___**

**November 6th**

“Miss Park?”

She’s been silent for too long now.

“Fire,” she blurts out, then immediately curses at herself. “Fireworks,” she says, as though it isn’t the worst cover-up she could have thought of. “I remember seeing fireworks.”

It was a horrible lie. It was too easy to disprove; no one had set off fireworks at six in the morning. But no one could prove that Sooyoung had paid any attention to the time, or that she had been sober enough to be reliable. It was flimsy, but it would hold up. If only barely.

“Right,” Detective Bae says, and it’s clear she doesn’t believe Sooyoung.

**___**

**November 6th**

“Miss Kim, do you have anyone who could verify your place at these parties?”

Yerim tilts her head slightly, thinking. Usually, the answer would be easy but not this time.

“I mean, a lot of people saw me and spoke to me,” she says, “but no one was really _ with _ me for the entire night. Normally, Sooyoung’s with me constantly but she kind of went MIA for most of the night.”

“Is that Sooyoung Park?” Detective Bae asks, leaning forward, only by a fraction, in her chair.

“Yeah,” Yerim says, not entirely sure why the detective cares so much all of a sudden when the rest of the interview had seemed so routine and monotonous. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” Detective Bae says, shaking her head with a smile on her face. “Thank you for your time, Miss Kim. You’re free to leave.”

**___**

**November 6th**

Joohyun sighs. “Wendy, I’d love to believe you; I just don’t think I can.”

Wendy pouts. “That seems unfair, Detective. I promise you I’m telling the truth.”

“You’re telling me you really stayed at home all night? On Halloween?” Wendy nods. “You’re a college student.”

“Are you really judging me for not going out and getting shit-faced, Joohyun?”

“Detective Bae,” Joohyun snaps.

“Right. Sorry,” Wendy says, very obviously not sorry at all.

A beat passes, with Joohyun flicking through her notepad and Wendy cleaning her nails.

“How well do you know a Sooyoung Park?”

Wendy’s head whips up. Too quickly. Joohyun smirks slightly. Shit.

“Only by name,” Wendy says, her voice as nonchalant as she can manage, which is a lot, considering. Considering that Joohyun has undoubtedly been interviewing students all day and, out of all the names she could have chosen to mention, it was Sooyoung. Sometimes, in the midst of all the teasing, Wendy forgets just how smart Joohyun is. It’s a stupid mistake to make. “She’s quite famous around campus, you know?”

“What for?” Joohyun sounds innocently curious, but Wendy knows it’s anything but.

“Being pretty, being a bitch, stuff like that.” Wendy tries to sound as though the topic bores her.

“Have you ever spoken to her?”

“Once. At a house party.” Only half a lie.

Joohyun hums lightly and Wendy hates the smug smile on her face. Wendy wishes she wore a watch; she’s been in here too long.

“I’m sure you didn’t keep anyone else in here this long, Detective Bae,” Wendy drawls. “And this isn’t supposed to be an interrogation anyway. You’re _ supposed _ to be asking me if I know anything about Professor Miller’s disappearance ‒ which I don’t ‒ not about my relationship with random people at my university. So, tell me: why are you treating me like a criminal when I haven’t done anything?”

Wendy knows why, of course she does. But she wants to hear Joohyun say it, wants her to admit to it.

But Joohyun, thanks to her annoying tendency to always do exactly the opposite of what Wendy wants, says, “you know why.”

Wendy sighs, letting out a hot breath of anger. She meets Joohyun’s eyes dead-on, lets her see the indignation there.

"Not all children are doomed to become their parents, Detective Bae,” she bites out.

Silence falls between them, heavy and stifling. Joohyun doesn’t look apologetic in the slightest, and Wendy fights the urge to wring her neck between her hands.

"If you have no further questions,” she says, pushing her palms flat against the surface of the table and using it to steady herself onto her feet, “I'll be leaving. I have an essay due tomorrow."

"You can't leave until I dismiss you."

"Then at least arrest me for something.” She’s not quite able to control her temper and she might regret that later but, right now, she just wants to get out of this god-forsaken interrogation room. “Oh wait ‒ you can't because I haven't done anything wrong." That wasn't a lie. Morality was subjective and, in Wendy's opinion, she hadn't done anything wrong. Although, Professor Miller would probably disagree.

When Joohyun doesn’t say anything, just purses her lips, Wendy stalks over to the door and pulls it open with perhaps too much force.

“I’ll see you soon, Wendy.”

“No you fucking won’t.”

**___**

**November 11th**

_ “Mrs Joanne Davis was found in her own house, with all the doors locked, brutally murdered. Stay tuned to find out how it happened and how the police found her killer on: A Stab in the Dark.” _

Sooyoung’s hand digs into the bowl of popcorn sitting on her stomach and plucks out a piece, putting it into her mouth and savouring the satisfying _ crunch _. Her head is in Yerim’s lap and she’s strewn across the sofa on her back, with her feet resting on Chanyeol.

There’s about ten of them in total, scattered around the floor and on various couches and each other, all snacking and vaguely tipsy ‒ enough so that they’re all watching a stupidly melodramatic true crime programme without fuss.

Sooyoung herself is on her third gin and tonic of the night, and is in that weird grey area where she still knows exactly what’s going on and where she is, but has absolutely no verbal filter and feels perpetually slightly dizzy.

Yerim’s fingers are playing with her hair and probably tangling it but Sooyoung takes it as a sign that her earlier awkwardness has been forgiven, so she lets her do as she pleases.

And the awkwardness is gone, for the most part, even if the guilt still remains like the smell of old cheese. There’s been no further questioning by the police, no more news about Miller’s mysterious disappearance, and her guilt-induced freak-outs have been kept to a minimum. Therefore, she thinks she’s doing pretty well for herself.

And maybe there’s that weird feeling that sits in her chest, telling her it’s weird that she hasn’t heard anything about Miller but she ignores it. She’s learning not to question good luck when the universe finally gives her some.

Someone says something and they all start laughing and Sooyoung joins in despite not knowing why.

She hasn’t seen Wendy since, either. Not even in passing, which is quite a feat considering they go to the same university. (And if Sooyoung has been avoiding the law building and the backs of the science blocks then that’s nobody’s business.)

And so, she surmises, it takes about ten or so working days to put a murder behind you. It’s not a bad rate, quite honestly. And she’s only kind of terrified that the guilt will never dissipate, so that counts as a win as well, which is quite impressive.

_ “Police arrived on the scene after Joanne’s daughter came to visit and found her dead on the living room floor.” _

The TV shows a blurry black and white picture of the living room in question.

Sooyoung winces. “Damn,” she says, a memory at the forefront of her mind, “carpet ‒ that is a bitch to get blood out of.”

She only realises what she’s said about three seconds after she’s said it, which is too long to cover it up into something different. So she spins her head around the room, taking in the facial expressions of her friends with panic shooting up her spine. Luckily, they seem just as out of it as she is, and either don’t respond or actually agree with her.

Sooyoung eyes the empty bottles littered around them and silently thanks them for their existence.

_ “Joanne was found in pieces on the floor,” _ the deep, Southern voice announces and all of them retch simultaneously when a picture of her body is shown on the TV. Someone whines _ is that even allowed? _ But Sooyoung doesn’t think it’s too bad. She’s seen worse.

_ “As you can see,” _ it says, zooming in on Joanne’s hand so that it’s overly large and pixelated, _ “Joanne was missing a thumb. And the police concluded that, from the messy tear and exorbitant blood- “ _ another synchronised gag, _ “-as well as the general shape-” _ as though that was meant to mean something, _ “-that the thumb must have been…” _ a very long, very unnecessary dramatic pause as the show zooms in on the thumb (or lack thereof) even more, so much so that it’s now entirely unrecognizable as a body part at all, _ “... bitten off.” _

A loud chorus of ‘_ eww, gross _ ’s and ‘ _ yo, what the fuck _’s, ring out across the room and even Sooyoung stops eating popcorn momentarily because it suddenly tastes too much like a thumb ‒ not that she’d know what that tastes like, of course.

“Hey, wait,” someone slurs, “isn’t that what that Wendy girl did to Professor Brown last semester?”

And then they’re all laughing too loudly.

“Oh my god!” Yerim says through her laughs. “I forgot she did that! What a psycho.”

“That’s not true,” Sooyoung says ditzily, without thinking, like a fucking idiot.

Silence. Instantaneous silence. _ Shit. _ The only noise is the TV man saying, _ “the thumb was later found inside Joanne’s bedside cabinet drawer and, even after being caught, the murderer refused to reveal why he did such a thing.” _

Sooyoung shrugs, trying to play it cool, like it’s the alcohol or something. “I mean, Prof. Brown still has both his thumbs so, like, unless he grew it back…” she trails off, hoping they’ll fill it in for themselves. They do, thank god, and Sooyoung lets out a massive sigh of relief, completely forgetting that Yerim can definitely feel it, and shoves as much popcorn into her mouth as possible, both out of stress and to avoid saying anything else.

It was a decent cover-up, all things considered ‒ such as the ones she’s tried in the past. And all it’s really done is make her look like a kill-joy because _ obviously _ everyone knows it’s not true. It’s not like she can tell them that she’s had a single night on repeat in her mind for the last week and a bit and everything she says is somehow related to that, can she?

It’s not her fault someone brought it up and Sooyoung’s brain made the connection before she could stop it.

**___**

**October 31st, 22:16**

“What were you doing in Miller’s office anyway?” Sooyoung asks, momentarily taking a break from scrubbing to look over to Wendy.

Wendy seems grateful for the excuse to rest as well, sitting back and dropping her cloth to the floor.

“I was looking for Professor Carter to talk to her about getting a position interning at her firm and heard a,” Wendy pauses, searching for the right word with an irritating smirk on her face, “commotion,” she finishes.

Sooyoung scoffs. “You want an internship? What for? I thought all you did was smoke weed and throw microwaves at people.”

“It was a toaster, actually,” Wendy says, apparently not offended in the slightest.

Sooyoung feels her eyes widen, staring incredulously at Wendy.

Wendy laughs, loud, and it feels so out of place when a dead body lays barely a metre away from her. It’s too bright for such a nightmarish setting, showing off her teeth when she tilts her head back. It’s unfair that it’s such a pretty sound when this is such an ugly situation.

“The rumour,” Wendy supplies when Sooyoung still looks confused. “The rumour was that I threw a toaster at a girl in my dorm because her toast was taking too long.” She laughs again. “I didn’t, though, if that’s what you’re worried about. They all think I’m far more aggressive than I actually am.”

Sooyoung gestures at the lump that is Professor Miller’s corpse behind her and Wendy flashes her a wicked grin.

“I really don’t think I’m entirely to blame for that one, Princess.”

Sooyoung flinches, fixing her eyes back on the spot of blood she’s supposed to be cleaning.

“So, this internship.” Sooyoung’s not sure why she’s trying to keep the conversation going. Maybe mindless small talk is a fraction better than crushing silence and stewing in her own mind. “Law, right?”

“Yup. Professor Carter is ridiculously strict on who she allows in, so I wanted to get an advantage in any way that I could.”

“Did you threaten to bite her thumb off if she didn’t give you the position?” Sooyoung says, more as a joke to herself than anything else but Wendy hears it and laughs again.

“Let’s just say that if Carter comes into class on Monday morning missing a thumb, you’ll know that I didn’t get in.”

Sooyoung laughs before she can stop herself and immediately feels bad about it.

“Your jaw must be strong.”

Wendy gives her an unreadable look. “I’ll tell you a secret, Princess.” Sooyoung nods, egging her on to continue. “I’ve never really had a taste for thumbs.”

Sooyoung laughs, and only feels bad that she doesn’t feel bad this time.

**___**

**November 11th**

_ “Have you figured it out?” _ the TV man says, and his voice grates against Sooyoung’s ears. _ “No? Well then, let’s run through how they done it!” _

Grammatically odd but thematically correct.

**___**

**October 31st, 19:47**

“Fuck! Shit! Oh my- _ Fuck _!” Sooyoung screeches. “What the fuck have we done? Oh my god!” She, stupidly, makes the mistake of looking down the stairs again. “Oh my god! Shit!”

“Calm dow-”

“Calm down? Calm down?! We just killed a whole fucking person and you want me to calm down?”

“Yes, and if you shout it any louder, the entirety of campus will hear!”

Sooyoung starts scrambling for something to do, something to reverse it, something to fix what she’s done. But there’s nothing. You can’t fix death. But she can try.

“We have to call an ambulance.”

“He’s already dead; what would be the point?”

“Well, we can’t just leave him here!” Sooyoung sounds hysterical but that’s fine, because she is.

“Obviously not,” Wendy scoffs, “he’ll be found and we’ll be caught and arrested. And, I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to go to prison for the rest of my life.”

“We-” Sooyoung scrapes around for something ‒ something legal ‒ to suggest, “we can just tell the police the truth ‒ that he attacked me and we killed him in self-defence.” That’s reasonable enough, and it’s not a lie either. A win on both counts; Sooyoung’s a little chuffed with herself.

“And do you really think they’re going to believe us? Whose side do you think they’re going to take: the rich, old, celebrated white professor? Or the two Asian girls that killed him?”

Sooyoung doesn’t quite have anything to say to that.

“Besides,” Wendy continues, a glint of something in her eyes, “your reputation kind of precedes you.” 

Sooyoung crosses her arms over her chest, voice taking on something resembling ice. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Wendy’s smile just grows. She looks entertained and it’s infuriating.

“Come on, Princess. You can stop pretending you have a moral compass. Everyone knows you were just playing at being the sweet, popular girl.” Wendy’s smile turns downright devious, her eyes locking with Sooyoung’s. “We all remember Bethany.”

Sooyoung’s blood runs cold.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Wendy cocks her head at an angle. “Oh, but the rest of campus does, sweetie.”

They stare at each other, and Sooyoung hates ‒ _ hates _‒ the look Wendy’s giving her. Some mix of amusement and challenge and something else Sooyoung doesn’t even want to try to decipher.

Trust Wendy to bring up something other people didn’t dare to touch. Trust her to pick out ‒ from all the others ‒ the one rumour too close to the truth. Trust her to be able to _ know. _Trust her to throw it back in Sooyoung’s face like acid.

“Being a little bitchy is not the same as killing someone,” Sooyoung spits out.

Wendy’s eyes widen, but not out of surprise. Joy, maybe?

“I’d say killing someone indirectly is probably just as bad,” Wendy says.

“Oh my god!” Sooyoung drones. “She didn’t kill herself; that was just a rumour.”

Wendy levels her with a look and Sooyoung feels suddenly too exposed, like Wendy can see right through her.

“Fine,” she relents, “but it was just an attempt.” She could leave it there, but it’s hard to not to add a bitchy, “and like, not a good one,” under her breath.

Wendy grins.

“Okay, well now we’ve established that you’re not as good a person as you pretend to be, we should probably figure out what to do with poor, dead Professor Miller,” Wendy says, pointing to the heap at the bottom of the stairs.

Sooyoung follows the line of her finger and shrieks upon seeing the body. “Fuck! I forgot about that.”

Wendy gives her a look, something akin to that of a disappointed parent, but Sooyoung doesn’t pay her any mind. Her brain is just full of _ shiiiit i just killed someone what the hell what do i do this is not good i’m too pretty to go to jail i’ve really fucked this one up he’s dead fuck. _ One long, flowing line of chaotic consciousness, each new thought of panic blending off into another. The words swarm around and around in her mind in one continuous scream.

A cackle rips through the pandemonium in her mind, through sheer absurdity alone. She whips to face Wendy, who is clutching at her stomach with one hand and pointing at Sooyoung with the other.

“Sorry,” she struggles to choke out between laughs, “it’s just- your face.”

Her words are swallowed by another bout of cackles again, and the noise is harsh against Sooyoung’s ears, somehow so very different to the melodic laughter she’s heard from Wendy before. It’s a startling contrast.

Sooyoung stares at Wendy in complete disbelief.

“A man is dead and you are laughing?”

“Well, he wasn’t a very nice man,” Wendy shrugs, “and I’m not technically laughing at _ him _ , I’m laughing at your reaction _ to _ him being dead.”

“They’re right,” Sooyoung says, realisation flooding through her, “you’re actually insane.”

Wendy pumps her eyebrows in a gesture that serves no purpose other than to make her look even creepier. “Why, thank you, Princess.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“But that’s your nickname, isn’t it? That’s what everyone calls you. Princess Park of SMU.”

Sooyoung feels a scowl cut across her face.

“But, in all seriousness, we should probably figure out what we’re going to do with this body before we get arrested.”

“Listen, I never said I would-”

“Do you want to go to prison, Park?” Wendy interrupts her, voice losing its teasing quality now. “Do you want to get a life sentence and rot in jail until you die, probably by hanging yourself in your cell at thirty three? Is that what you want?”

Silence.

Sooyoung shakes her head. Wendy’s smile finds its way back onto her face and she claps her hands together.

“Well then, guess you better put that pretty little head of yours to use and start thinking of how we get rid of good old Professor Miller.”

“You’re the law student,” Sooyoung says, because she can barely remember her own name, let alone think of a creative way to elude the police. “You’re probably better equipped to think of something than I am.”

Wendy flashes her a smirk that tells Sooyoung that she definitely knows what Sooyoung’s trying to do.

“You’re right.” But she goes along with it anyway. “Well, first things first: people can’t know he’s dead.”

Sooyoung stares at her for a moment, trying to figure out if she’s joking. But Wendy seems entirely serious so Sooyoung says, “well, hate to break it to you, Wendy, but he’s pretty fucking dead. What are you trying to suggest? We ‘_ Weekend at Bernie’s _’ him until we graduate? ‘Cos if that’s your big idea we may as well just drive him straight to the police station right now.”

“Of course that’s not my idea, Sooyoung ‒ though, you have to admit that that would be quite fun.” At Sooyoung’s derisive look, Wendy rolls her eyes and continues. “My idea, is that if they don’t believe he’s dead, there won’t be a murder investigation and they could never convict us. If they think he’s just missing, or he’s run away, gone off the grid, then there’s no crime and we aren’t criminals.”

Sooyoung nods slowly. “But why would a distinguished professor just suddenly go off the grid? No one’s going to believe that.”

“Maybe he’s in debt. Maybe he’s being blackmailed. Maybe he’s a repressed gay man stuck in a loveless marriage and would do anything to get away from his psycho wife. Maybe the guilt of his past has finally caught up to him. Who knows? Not us. But the police will think of _ something _ to explain it and they’ll drop the case.”

“Okay,” Sooyoung says, understanding creeping into her veins, “but what did you mean by his past had finally caught up to him?”

Wendy gapes at her in surprise. “You really don’t know?”

Sooyoung shakes her head.

“Wow, you really do not come out of your little bubble, do you?” It doesn’t sound judging, more just bewildered. Sooyoung doesn’t know if she prefers this. “Let’s just say,” Wendy pauses for a moment, thinking, “you weren’t the first.”

Shock and disgust wrap tight around Sooyoung’s gut. Some part of her wants to ask more but she doesn’t dare; she doesn’t really want to know.

“Anyway, so we’re going to need to clean this place up. Blood is always rather telling of murder. D’you reckon he keeps bleach around here?”

“There’s some in the faculty kitchen down the hall,” Sooyoung says. “No CCTV either; they couldn’t afford it.”

“Wonderful. Okay, that’s sorted. Now, what to do with the body?” Wendy fixes her gaze on said body as though it might help her to think of something. Sooyoung, however, determinedly looks everywhere but the body.

Quiet falls between them, not quite silence because Sooyoung can practically hear both of their brains thinking at full capacity. She’s searching her mind for something ‒ anything. She’s thinking back to all those old crime programmes she used to watch, thinking of all the ways they hid bodies. The problem with those programmes, though: the criminals always got caught. Dread catches her in the chest.

She may as well be dead, too. Just ship her off to a graveyard and bury her- wait.

“A graveyard,” she says under her breath. Then again, louder. “A graveyard!”

Wendy looks at her. “What about a graveyard?”

“That’s where we put him. There’ll already be a grave dug so we just have to dig a little deeper and cover it up then they’ll put another body over it and fill the grave and _ boom _ !” She’s so elated with her idea that she doesn’t even feel ashamed saying _ boom _ aloud. “They’ll never find him.”

“Genius,” Wendy exclaims, and, to her credit, looks like she genuinely means it. “Knew you were more than just a pretty face, Princess.”

Sooyoung. Despite how many times she’s been told she’s pretty, despite knowing it herself (because how could she not?) feels her ears grow hot.

“But,” Wendy says, “I feel like we should still make it more foolproof. For there to be a court case ‒ for there to even be an investigation ‒ there needs to be a body. Without a body, it’s just a missing person case. We need a way to get rid of the body entirely. If they somehow find the body, they can trace it back to this university, to this room and then to us. There’s got to be _ something _.”

And Sooyoung understand what she’s saying, even if she feels a bit miffed due to her protectiveness for her idea.

“Fire?” she suggests.

Wendy shakes her head almost immediately. “Too easy to mess up, and we’d never make a good enough fire that it would completely turn the teeth to ash. I’ve studied far too many cases where people have tried to burn a body only to be figured out by the teeth. The police may all be corrupt and hypocrites, but they do get their job done when they put their mind to it.” That last part sounds just a tad too bitter, like Wendy’s hit one of her own sore spots. Sooyoung decides not to push it. The less she knows about Wendy, the better (even if she desperately wants to know more).

Wendy taps her fingers against her arms where they’re crossed over her chest, face contorted as she thinks, muttering ominously under her breath.

Suddenly, she snaps her fingers and the sound of it echoes around the large office.

“Alkaline hydrolysis!” she exclaims, face looking like she’s just discovered the cure for cancer. Which, Sooyoung muses, wouldn’t be so bad. They could sell it and then bribe their way out of prison instead of doing something as difficult as disposing of a body in secret.

When Wendy doesn’t continue, Sooyoung speaks. “What.”

“Alkaline hydrolysis,” Wendy sounds out slowly, as though it was hearing that Sooyoung was having trouble with.

“As in, the digestive process? Do you want us to eat him?”

“What? No, we’re not eating him ‒ unless you want to.” Wendy winks at her. “I know shit all about digestive processes or whatever but listen right, so last year, my cousin died.” Sooyoung feels shock overtake her face at the flippancy of Wendy’s tone.

“Don’t look at me like that; it’s fine; she was a bitch anyway. The point is: that entire side of my family are basically psychos ‒ they’re all freaks obsessed with saving the environment, even though ‒ let’s be honest ‒ we all know the earth is fucked. Honestly, it’s kind of ironic she died in a car crash.” Wendy chuckles slightly and maybe Sooyoung understands what true fear is.

“But, when she died, they didn’t want to bury her or cremate her ‘cos they got all pissy and complained that it was bad for the environment or whatever. So, they used alkaline hydrolysis instead. It decomposes the body really quickly in an organic way. They’d never be able to identify him.”

Wendy finishes with a grin that shows off too much teeth. Sooyoung takes a moment to process the words. It makes sense, with what she knows of internal hydrolysis, though she’s never heard of it being used to decompose an entire body.

“And you’re sure it’ll work?”

“Well,” Wendy says, shrugging, “it’s more of a failsafe anyway ‒ I doubt they’ll be looking in a graveyard under other people’s graves in the first place. This is just to make sure they never get to him.”

“Okay.” Sooyoung breathes out, like that’s some marker for her fully committing to the plan. “How does it work?”

Wendy hesitates. “Okay, so I didn’t pay that much attention because, you know, I didn’t _ really _ care but I remember that it uses a shit ton of water and some sort of _ oxide _ chemical.”

Sooyoung thinks, rattling through lists of chemicals and first-year biology lessons and finally putting her university education and all the money she’s spent on it to good use. Then it dawns on her: _alkaline_ _hydro_-lysis.

“You’d need an alkaline metal hydroxide,” she says, nodding her head. “We’ve got loads in the labs.”

“Sooyoung, you brilliant chemistry student, you,” Wendy says. “Okay, we’ve got that sorted then. Water we can get from any of the water fountains. You go to the labs; I’ll go home: I’ve got like a collection of empty water bottles ‒ don’t ask why.”

Sooyoung nods along, determination beginning to replace the fear. And, for a short while, she can almost forget why they’re planning like this.

“It won’t decompose any inorganic material though,” she says, the sudden realisation hitting her with all the force of a truck. “It wouldn’t get rid of like his clothes or anything.”

Wendy waves her concerns off. “We can burn all of that. We’ll take some of his extra clothes and money and burn that, too. Then it’ll look like he really did flee.”

“Right,” Sooyoung says.

“Right, well, I guess we’ve got ourselves a plan. Nice work, Princess.”

A beat passes.

“Shit. How do we get the body out of here without being seen?”

Wendy thinks for a moment. “Well, pretty much all the students are at parties so they won’t be around. The teachers are probably all at home, so we won’t have to worry about getting caught transporting him.”

“I’m not touching a dead body. And I’m definitely not carrying one around campus.” 

“Body bags,” Wendy says, like it’s obvious.

“And where are going to get body bags? They don’t exactly leave them lying around for people to take for free every time they commit a murder.”

Wendy laughs, too freely. “The drama department has a bunch; they won’t miss one.”

“Okay,” Sooyoung relents.

“Far more than okay; we might just get away with this.”

“Don’t jinx it.”

Wendy cackles again. “Come on, Princess. I’ll drive.”

**___**

**November 11th**

_ “The murderer snuck in through the basement, from a secret passage built during the house’s construction in 1832. He waited for a total of sixteen hours before seizing his opportunity and venturing upstairs.” _

Sooyoung jolts back into the present, jerking slightly and causing a few pieces of popcorn to jump out of the bowl and onto the floor. Yerim gives her a weird. Sooyoung tries to smile back, hoping it doesn’t look as painful as it feels on her face.

She focuses her attention back on the TV, willing her mind to ignore the urge to run away from any and all reminders of her own crime.

_ “And, although the passage had been forgotten and well-hidden for almost eighty years, the police were able to locate it and use then-advanced forensic science to scour the passage and find the killer: Joanne’s gardener.” _

“I knew it was the fucking gardener!” someone shouts.

“No you didn’t, you liar. You thought it was the cook,” someone else yells back.

_ “See,” _ TV man says, _ “no matter how convoluted the plot, no matter how complex the plan, justice will always prevail and the murderer will always be caught. We’ll see you next week for another episode of… A Stab in the Dark!” _

The rest of the group start talking immediately, discussing what to watch next or how they’d figured out the killer but Sooyoung can’t join in. All she can think is: _ the murderer will always be caught, the murderer will always be caught, the murderer will always be- _

“Sooyoung?” Sooyoung startles when Yerim puts a hand on her shoulder. It weighs hot and heavy against her skin. “Are you alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Was it the thumb? I mean, it_ was _ gross but-”

Sooyoung stands up, too quickly. The popcorn topples to the floor.

“I need to go,” she just about manages to stutter out. “Essay ‒ I forgot, due tomorrow.”

It’s a flimsy excuse, but she doesn’t care as she heads out the door, barely even hearing her friends calling out her name or the door slamming shut behind her. She can only hear one thing, on repeat.

_ No matter how complex the plan, the murderer will always be caught. _

**___**

**November 19th**

Professor Anderson drones on about the practical they’re supposed to be doing in that horrible, monotone voice of his. And Sooyoung tries her hardest to focus. That isn’t very much though.

They’re in the labs, which doesn’t help. Not when Sooyoung’s eyes keep drifting to the supply closet at the back of the room as though someone might be able to tell that some of the stock of potassium hydroxide was missing.

It really does not help at all.

“Okay class,” Anderson says, still sounding as bored with himself as the rest of the class are, “you may start.”

Shit. Sooyoung had really not been listening. She relies on her partner to grab the things they need, flashing him a charming smile and hoping that some light flirting will be enough for him to commandeer the entire practical.

She rests her chin on the back of her hand and tries not to think about it.

**___**

**October 31st, 20:21**

She gets out of Wendy’s car, a tote bag dangling from her shoulder, and tiptoes to the entrance of the chemistry block as though that would do anything. If the muffled sounds of laughter coming from Wendy’s car aren’t enough to tell her that she looks ridiculous, then her reflection in one of the darkened windows certainly is.

She stops tiptoeing. Though she does still take care to tread very lightly.

She hears Wendy’s car take off and it’s suddenly very, very quiet. She misses Wendy’s laughter, even if it were at her own expense.

The door’s open, thank god, and she creeps in, navigating it easily even in the relative darkness. She’s been walking these hallways for the last two years and it’s finally come in handy. She follows her normal route up a flight of stairs and down another hallway, until she reaches Lab 3B.

She sends up a prayer for the door to be open, along with a quick one for forgiveness

The door pushes open and Sooyoung silently rejoices.

The room is eerie in the dark. Moonlight streams in through the windows and bounces off of the white surfaces of the tables, making the room seem pale and ghostly. Her shoes echo with each step as they tap against the flooring. There’s something so unsettling about being in a classroom after hours, something so otherworldly about being here in darkness.

There’s something disconcerting about being in a place that’s such an integral part of her normal life, in the middle of doing something that will ensure she can never return to normalcy again.

She makes her way to the back, and pulls the door open. Not locked. She’s starting to feel like the university _ wants _ to be robbed at this rate.

She flicks the light on, and the brightness of it hits hard against her eyes after the darkness of night. She scans the shelves, looking for the large glass bottles she _ knows _ they keep here. It’s organised poorly, which isn’t exactly a surprise, but it’s still frustrating. The longer she spends in here, the bigger the risk. The longer she spends in here, the more chance someone walks in to count inventory or just to steal some raw ethanol to see if they could get drunk off it because they’re stupid.

She finally finds where the alkaline solutions are stocked, all out of place and in mismatched rows and she begins searching. There’s quite a few large containers of sodium hydroxide and she’ll settle for them if she can’t find potassium. She shuffles the bottles around, searching somewhat frantically now.

Momentarily, she panics about leaving her fingerprints on all these bottles but then she remembers that she’s a chemistry student and it is perfectly normal for her fingerprints to be on chemicals in the chemistry lab. She curses at murder for making her dumb.

She’s about to give up and make-do with sodium hydroxide when her eye catches a _ K _ on the highest shelf. She blesses her height and reaches up, letting out a sigh of relief as her fingers close around the bottle. Upon further look, there’s a whole selection of bottles marked _ KOH _and she could almost cry with joy. It’s a high concentration, too, and maybe god does love her. (Or maybe god just really hates Professor Miller.)

Wendy never really specified how much they would need for the reaction other than ‘a lot’, which really isn’t very helpful but, from what Sooyoung knows about chemical reactions and just general common sense, she surmises that she should probably just grab as much as she possibly can. She hefts the tote bag off of her shoulder and starts piling bottles into it, wincing at the _ clink _ they make when they make contact with one another.

When she’s gathered all the available bottles, and the bag is unreasonably heavy and bulky, she leaves the supply closet, flicking the light switch as she does so.

There’s something nagging at her about how smoothly this has gone, about how this was all too easy. It’s like a shadow lingering at the back of her mind, staying just at the edges of her peripheral. It keeps her looking over her back, even though she _ knows _ there’s no one there. It doesn’t keep her from spinning her head every three seconds, as though someone is going to emerge from beneath one of the tables and shout, “Boo! You’re under arrest!” and start reading her her Miranda Rights.

Maybe this murder is hitting her harder than she’d previously thought.

She pads out of the building, gripping her bag close to her side and still throwing cautionary glances over her shoulder.

Wendy’s car is already there. The engine’s running, evident from the low hum breaking through the silence.

She struggles to open the door with the bag restricting her movement for a moment before Wendy takes pity on her and leans across the passenger seat to open it for her. Wendy’s still laughing when she finally sits down.

“Got the stuff?” Wendy asks, as though they’re just juvenile delinquent drug dealers and not literal murderers.

Sooyoung raises the bag up to indicate _ yes _.

She looks into the backseat and _ woah. _ Wendy was not kidding when she said that she has a collection of plastic bottles.

There must be at least thirty of them, all different sizes, haphazardly in a heap in the back of the car.

Sooyoung turns to Wendy. “Do you hate the earth?”

Wendy shrugs. “Well, I hate my aunt. It’s more or less the same outcome.”

Sooyoung rolls her eyes and Wendy kicks the car into gear.

**___**

**November 19th**

“Shit!”

The conical flask slips from her grasp. It shatters as it hits the floor and all eyes turn to her. She apologises to Professor Anderson quickly, reaching over to take the paper towels he offers her with as much of a smile as she can manage.

Her lab partner says, “I’ve got it, Sooyoung; don’t worry,” and extracts the towels from her hands before dropping to the floor.

“Thanks,” she mutters.

Hydrochloric acid ‒ dilute, thank goodness ‒ spreads out on the floor in a clear puddle. But it’s quickly mopped up, and now there’s no trace of it having been there at all.

**___**

**November 23rd**

So, Sooyoung’s freaking out.

Quite honestly, she’s been in a state of perpetual and unending freaking out for the last few days. Every single little thing somehow reminds her about Halloween. Whether it’s bottles of Everclear, or bottles of chemicals, or just boring old plastic water bottles. Whether it’s unrelated things like hearing a car, or even horribly pointed and direct things, like people asking her how her Halloween was even though almost an entire month has passed.

She’s only spoken to Wendy once more, and she had pretty much just laughed at her, told her to relax, and told her to act normal.

It was shitty advice but it was the only advice she was going to get, so she took it to heart and now repeats it like a mantra in her head throughout the day.

It can’t be too difficult, she reasons, to act normal. She did it everyday before Halloween.

She soon finds out that acting normal, when trying to act normal, is incredibly fucking difficult.

And so, in an attempt to ‘act normal’, she finds herself at a house party, on a fucking Sunday night, kind of drunk but not really and making out with a girl she only knows by name. It’s not good, which isn’t surprising but still a bit of a let-down.

The lights are flashing too quickly and she’s cold in her outfit even though she looks drop-dead gorgeo- nope. Wrong word choice. She looks good. Like, _ really good. _

Yerim’s in the middle of the dancefloor, shooting her a thumbs-up and still having some semblance of rhythm despite having downed four shots of tequila in succession less than twenty minutes ago. It’s impressive, to say the least.

The music is about as shit as to be expected, some EDM track with too much bass and not enough actual music. But it’s normal, and it’s these little things that are all tiny reminders of what her life used to be, pre-Halloween that are supposed to be helping her to ease back into her normal life.

However, they are not doing that.

Instead, they just make her feel out of place. Like she’s a puzzle piece that was taken out of a perfectly peaceful finished puzzle, and disfigured beyond recognition so that when she’s put back into the puzzle, she doesn’t fit. It’s a shit simile but Sooyoung, panicked and gay and drunk, really cannot think of a better one. The point is, that trying to return to regular life after ending someone else’s is a difficult feat.

Which, while understandable, is very annoying.

The point is, that the party feels very much like it’s happening around her and she’s stuck inside her own head, reliving Halloween over and over again.

She uses her grip on the back of the girl’s head to get her to pull away and mumbles, “restroom,” as an excuse. She doesn’t stay around long enough to see the girl’s response and starts to push her way through the crowd, resolutely ignoring the people trying to talk to her. Sometimes popularity is a bitch, and Sooyoung has always thought that, but she’s been thinking it more and more lately.

She makes her way upstairs, only tripping up twice which she counts as a win.

It’s quieter upstairs, even though the bass still pounds through the floor and she can definitely hear moans coming from at least two of the bedrooms ‒ and maybe the bathroom, too.

She looks down the hallway, searching for something but she’s not quite sure what. An escape from the constant reminders of Wendy and Halloween? If that’s right, she doesn’t find it. Because she’s in a hallway, at a house party, and somehow that’s enough.

**___**

**18 months ago**

“Sooyoung Park.”

Sooyoung looks up, sways on her feet a little. She can make out the girl in front of her, recognises her. Recognises her the same way people recognise Sooyoung herself. As the face around which a million rumours were built and spread ‒ an enigma, a story.

Sooyoung pulls herself up to her full height and levels Wendy Son with a look.

“Yes,” she says. She sounds uninterested. “Did you need something?”

Even in the dim lighting, Sooyoung can see the smirk that crosses Wendy’s face and maybe she understands just a little more why those rumours exist.

“No, nothing in particular,” Wendy hums, but makes no move to leave.

“Then why are you still standing there?”

Wendy laughs, and it does nothing but annoy Sooyoung. “Sorry. Did I say something you found funny? Go and poison water fountains or whatever it is you do.”

“Only if you’ll come with me.”

Sooyoung scoffs. “Fuck off, Son. Why are you even here?”

“Got an invite.”

Sooyoung rolls her eyes. “They must have been desperate then.”

“Yeah.” Wendy’s eyes move up and down Sooyoung’s body. “They must have been.”

Something snaps in Sooyoung. And she doesn’t consider herself a violent person, but she is ready to slap a bitch if Wendy says something else. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Wendy meets her eyes again, and Sooyoung almost wishes she hadn’t.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

A beat passes.

“The rumours are right about you. You’re an absolute freak.”

Wendy hums again. Not a noise of agreement, nor one of protest. Just a noise.

“I’d hoped the rumours wouldn’t be right about you,” she muses, not really looking at Sooyoung any more. It sounds more like she’s speaking to herself than another person.

And Sooyoung, for all she pretends to not care what other people think about her, sorely does.

“And?” she prompts, forcing herself to sound more irritated than curious.

Wendy fixes her with a grin, mirth back in her eyes.

“I’ll see you around, Sooyoung.”

And then she’s walking down the stairs and her footsteps are blending in with the music and she’s gone. College house parties are always a surreal experience, but this one takes the cake, no; it takes the whole bakery.

She doesn’t let her mind dwell on Wendy Son and her weirdness for much longer. At the end of the day, she’s irrelevant to Sooyoung’s life. She’s unimportant.

**___**

**November 23rd**

She’s back on the dancefloor now, having decided that being upstairs means being alone with her thoughts and that’s not the aim of tonight.

People are too close and it’s hot and tight and sweaty and everyone smells bad, but it roots her firmly in the present. It’s second nature to her, to move her limbs in time to the beat. To let the music take over, lift her out of her own mind. And, for once, she’s grateful for the indistinct quality to the music, because it means that it’s generic enough to not trigger any unwanted memories, generic enough to make her feel like her old self. Generic enough to pretend she hasn’t killed someone.

She plays at acting normal for a while, dancing next to Yerim with the pair of them yelling nonsensical things that neither of them can really hear over the music at each other.

But, all good things must come to an end. And that is particularly true for Sooyoung whenever she experiences even a single moment of happiness. At least, that’s been the case since Halloween.

Her attempt at normalcy falls through when some tasteless, idiotic nobody still stuck in the last millennium decides to put on a song by the BeeGees.

Maybe god does hate Sooyoung, but she just has a flair for the dramatics.

The synthy intro blasts through the speakers sounding like a gunshot in Sooyoung’s ears. The people around her cheer and laugh, breaking out into exaggerated disco moves and pretending they know any of the words besides the chorus.

Sooyoung knows someone who actually knows all the words. And she really does not want to be thinking about that person right now.

The music is too loud and she hates it. She hates this song and everything it reminds her of because it’s everything she’s been trying to escape. And suddenly she’s back in that stuffy car with the scent of ash and dirt clinging to her nose and her hands are sore and aching with blisters and Wendy’s voice is right in her ear, singing along to this stupid fucking song and she can’t breathe because the air is full of smoke.

She can’t breathe. Fuck, she can’t breathe.

She barrels her way through the crowd, not caring ‒ for once in her life ‒ about how she looks and storms upstairs. She sprints along the hallway and bursts through the first empty door, letting it slam behind her and sinking down onto the floor.

Air isn’t going into her lungs; it all feels like it’s going to her head and it’s terrifying. Her chest is burning and she claws at it with her fingernails, trying to _ somehow _ subdue the pain, tear the flesh away with her own hands so that she can get air into her system. But the air she chokes on is dense and heavy and tastes like cinders. The ash coats the inside of her throat, trapping the air and constricting the airways even further. Fire grows in her stomach just like it did on Halloween and it _ hurts _.

(She wonders if this is how Professor Miller felt as he decomposed in a pit in the ground via exothermic reaction.)

Tears leak from her eyes, but not from sadness. They’re just there because she’s in pain and they blur her vision even further, until the entire bedroom is distorted and wrong.

She pounds her hands against the floor in some animalistic, futile attempt to expel the pain ‒ or at least direct it elsewhere. It doesn’t work.

Because she can still hear that stupid fucking BeeGees song through the thin walls. And she can still hear the scrape of a shovel against dirt, can still feel the phantom weight of it in her own hands.

**___**

**October 31st, 23:45**

"Oh my god! This is so fucking exhausting!" Sooyoung leans on her shovel, panting heavily.

"Keep digging, or you'll find that I am perfectly capable of burying two bodies on my own," Wendy grits out, with a glint in her eye that says she's not joking.

Sooyoung starts digging again.

It’s almost therapeutic, if she were to forget about _ why _ she’s digging. Something at the back of her mind tells her that this could be some kind of ASMR concept and the thought of it startles a laugh out of her. Wendy gives her a strange look, but doesn’t press it and Sooyoung feels relieved; she’s not sure how she would have explained herself.

The shovel rubs against the palm of her hand, solid and painful. She knows it’ll be worse tomorrow, that the inside of her hands will be blistered and bruised it will hurt to touch anything. She knows the same will ring true for her mind, too.

She pushes on. Digging the shovel into the dirt, throwing it up blindly to the surface as they deepen an already six foot deep grave. The gravestone says that it belongs to a William Jones who will be _ fondly remembered _ and apparently kicked the bucket at the ripe old age of ninety four.

Professor Miller ‒ his soon-to-be grave-mate ‒ did not reach such an age. Nope, he was murdered by two college kids at fifty six. It’s not too much of an age difference. Sooyoung hopes they get along.

The grave deepens bit by bit, and every single part of Sooyoung aches.

The ground, at least, isn’t frozen and difficult to dig like she’d worried it would be. It breaks away with only a little force. So that’s nice. There’s not really much else Sooyoung can say is nice about this situation, so she has to take what she can get. Like soft dirt.

It’s all about the little victories.

Wendy’s going at the grave digging like a pro, which is a little terrifying, but Sooyoung chooses to be grateful for it rather than question it. After all, after tonight, they’ll never have to speak again.

The less she knows about Wendy, the better.

And, despite the pain, despite the throbbing aches gnawing at her joints, despite her muscles being fatigued to the point of ineffective contraction, she’s still somewhat glad for the manual labour. If only because, when her mind’s preoccupied with thinking _ oh my god this hurts _ over and over, she’s unable to stew in her thoughts of guilt and sin and _ what the fuck i am digging an actual fucking grave. _

So she keeps digging. And digging. And digging.

And she can only hope she can dig deep enough to bury this secret forever.

**___**

**November 23rd**

The door creaks open and Sooyoung flinches.

On instinct, she hides her face, pulling her knees up and burying her head between them._ They can’t see her like this; they can’t know how much of a mess she is; they cannot know._

She still can’t breathe, though, and this new position doesn’t help in the slightest. She lets out a strangled sob, and feels a comforting hand come to rest gently on her back, stroking soothingly.

That makes it even worse, somehow, and she hyperventilates harder, feeling the smoke begin to work its way into her blood. Feels it bind to her cells and suffocate them.

“You’re okay,” the person says and Sooyoung doesn’t know whether to feel mortified or relieved when she recognises it.

“You’re okay, Sooyoungie,” Yerim whispers into her ear. “You’re okay.”

But she’s _ not _.

But she can’t say that because she can’t breathe because she’s not okay. Because she killed someone. And she’s been trying to ignore that and just go about her life but how can she when she ended someone else’s?

She shakes her head violently.

“No,” she pushes out through the smoke, and it comes out breathy and strained and quiet but she still gets it out and that’s going to have to be enough. “No.”

“No?” Yerim’s voice is nothing but loving and Sooyoung hates it because _ she doesn’t deserve it. _

“I-” but her voice breaks and smoke rushes in to fill the gap. She coughs, the force of it scraping against the inside of her throat and it hurts but she has to tell her, she has to tell someone because the weight of carrying it around has been crushing her and now it’s choking her and she’s sure it will kill her if she doesn’t let it out.

“I did something bad.” She doesn’t want to say it. Even with all her conviction and how much it hurts, it is so, _ so _ difficult to convince herself to say it out loud to another person who isn’t Wendy. It is so difficult to pull her tongue into the right shapes, to speak past the smoke in her throat.

“I killed him.”

Yerim freezes. And that’s it. It’s done. It’s true. She’s going to jail.

Wendy was right. It isn’t forensics or detectives that get you caught. It’s guilt.

“I killed Professor Miller.” Now that she’s started, and she can feel the smoke leaking out of her lungs with every word, she can’t stop. “He tried to touch me and I- I panicked and hit him over the head with a vase and he- he died. I killed him. I killed him and we buried his body and burnt his clothes and I _ killed _ him.”

Yerim’s eyes widen, and her mouth falls agape. She stares at Sooyoung for a long moment and Sooyoung knows it’s only a matter of time as Yerim processes the words before she’s legging it to the door and calling the police and everyone will know and Sooyoung will go to jail and she’ll deserve it.

But then Yerim’s hand is combing through Sooyoung’s hair delicately.

“It’s okay,” she says softly.

What.

“What,” Sooyoung says. “What do you mean ‘it’s okay’? Do you understand what I just said?”

Yerim hums in confirmation.

“So you just found out that I killed someone and your response it: ‘it’s okay’?”

Yerim shrugs. “He tried to harass you; he deserved it. Besides, he’s already dead ‒ what’s turning you over to the police going to do now? I’d much rather keep my best friend.”

“I… I can’t bel- You don’t care?”

Sooyoung was already on her feet before she realised what she was doing. And then she was out the door and storming down the stairs, ignoring Yerim calling out her name behind her.

She just has to get away. She’s not sure where she’s going, but that’s fine. She just needs to get away.

**___**

**October 31st, 19:30**

“Get the fuck away from me, you creep!”

Everything in Sooyoung’s mind is going haywire because Miller is too close and she’s panicking and she can’t scream because there’s no one nearby and no one will hear her.

“Oh, stop being such a fucking tease, Sooyoung.” She hates how her name sounds in his creepy-ass gravelly voice. “Do you want to pass or not?”

And then he’s reaching out for her, hand heading towards her waist and Sooyoung screams, and, acting entirely on instinct, grabs the first thing she can reach and doesn’t even register the door opening behind her as she brings it down on his head. The vase shatters, pieces of ceramic flying everywhere and one cuts into the side of her finger.

Miller stumbles, and his eyes go glassy before he finds Sooyoung and snarls, loud and gross and animalistic. Blood streaks tracks onto his forehead.

“You fucking bitch,” he slurs, grabbing around both of her wrists in an unrelenting, vice-like grip and tugging her towards him.

And then suddenly there’s hands on Miller’s chest and a grunt as someone pushes him and he lets go of Sooyoung’s wrists, toppling backwards.

There’s a horrible, horrible moment when he teeters on the edge of the top step, struggling to find balance by flailing his arms out. He makes eye contact with Sooyoung for not even a second.

Sooyoung has less than a second to decide.

She steps forward and pushes him with as much force as she can muster.

He falls down the staircase like a ragdoll. With a new set of bones breaking each time he hits a new stair. It’s torturously long and so horrifically vile but Sooyoung can’t look away. Can’t look away from how his neck flops from side to side. Can’t look away from how his limbs bend the wrong way. Can’t look away from the man she just murdered.

She hears one final _ crack _ when he hits the floor.

He doesn’t move again.

**___**

**November 23rd**

She runs through campus in her heels, her ankles twisting precariously and exhaustion plaguing the back of her mind. She doesn’t pay it any mind, she can’t. Not when her mind is in utter frenzy. There aren't any actual competent thoughts going through her brain, it’s just white noise and panic.

All she can see is Yerim’s understanding face and Professor Miller’s savage one.

She hates it. The images pain her but they haunt her even when her eyes are open.

She races across paths and through buildings on pure instinct, letting her gut take her somewhere as long as it’s far away from Yerim and Professor Miller and the fucking BeeGees.

The cold bites at her skin, pushes her hairs to stand on end and digs into her pores. It feels exposing, like it will strip away her flesh to leave her bare and broken and sick in the head for everyone to see. Like it will rip away the personna she’s built up over the years and leave the raw, truthful, scared little girl beneath the bravado.

The moon is too harsh, and the light burns where it touches her skin.

She’s in front of a building now, and her addled mind doesn’t recognise which one it is. If she could, she would hate the irony, hate her own body for leading her here. She would hate that it’s entirely logical, that it’s the only place she could really have gone.

She takes the elevator, because she blanches at the sight of the stairs and can’t stomach the thought of reliving it all over again going up them.

The journey up the three floors is slow ‒ agonisingly so. There’s no music, no noise of any kind, and so Sooyoung’s left alone with her manic thoughts and her reflection staring obnoxiously back at her.

She isn’t looking too good, to put it lightly. Which is a shame, considering how fine she’d looked when she’d left the house earlier this evening. Some part of her wants to laugh at how absurd this all is. At how, even through a mental break and while feeling the worst she’s ever felt, she can still find space amongst her thoughts to worry about her appearance.

Old habits die hard, she supposes.

She does look objectively bad, though. Her eyeliner has smudged so much that it’s practically replaced the dark shadows she’d taken care to hide earlier. There are obvious tear tracks through her foundation, and it’s all blotchy from where she’d been rubbing at her face. Her eyes are redder than Wendy’s are when she’s high and her hair is a tangled blob of black wire. It winds down beyond her shoulders looking more like a ball of wool that than the gentle waterfall she’d styled before.

All in all, she looks like shit.

The elevator dings and she’s forcibly snapped out of her reverie and pulled back into reality. The doors open painfully slowly, and as soon as she can, she’s pushing her way between the two sliding pieces of metal and throttling herself down the hallway.

She’s in front of the door and, before she can even ask herself if this is a good idea, she’s rapping her knuckles against it with so much force it hurts. She doesn’t care. Not right now.

She continues to knock against the wood, uncaring for how late it is and how many people she might be disturbing. On one knock, her fist continues on in its trajectory into empty space as the door is ripped open.

“What,” Wendy grits out tersely.

She looks angry but that melts away in a second when she sees who Sooyoung is. So many emotions flash across Wendy’s face that Sooyoung has trouble picking out even one.

“Sooyoung?” 

Sooyoung wants to say something, wants to get everything she feels off of her chest, needs to speak anything from her mind into the world so she doesn’t have to keep it all to herself any more because it _ hurt _s. She opens her mouth, wide as though that will help her move it into the shape she wants.

There’s so much she wants to say but her tongue can’t form a single one and it’s frustrating and she hates it just so much.

A harrowing noise scrapes out of her throat, and she collapses forward with a cry because she can’t stand by herself any more, hiding her face in Wendy’s shoulder.

Wendy tenses but she doesn’t push her away. Rather, she cautiously wraps her arms loosely around Sooyoung’s shaking form and they stay like that for a while.

Sooyoung’s crying properly now. Horrible, taxing, and strenuous sobs that leave her feeling hollow. Her cries are muffled in the fabric of Wendy’s oversized jumper but that doesn’t do much. They’re still loud and they still hurt her ears and she can’t imagine how it feels for Wendy but she doesn’t need to because she just needs to get it all out.

Her arms hang limply at her side, and she can’t summon the courage to move them. Even though she wants to wrap them tightly around Wendy’s waist just so she has _ something _ to hold onto ‒ something to tether her to reality.

It’s when, after who knows how long, her panicked, shallow breaths begin to subside into long, deep and drawn-out ones because it feels like, no matter how hard she breathes, she still can’t get enough air into her lungs ‒ they still burn with deprivation; it’s then that Wendy begins to walk backwards into her flat. Not away from Sooyoung, just guiding her slowly so that they’re not stood in the doorway.

Sooyoung goes pliantly because she feels so utterly powerless.

There’s a soothing hand on her back, stroking lightly and it helps to ground her, but only just. She feels Wendy shift her gently onto a sofa, but doesn’t remove herself from where she’s still latching onto Wendy. She doesn’t want to look up. Doesn’t want to see the judgement and amusement she’s come to expect from Wendy.

Wendy’s taking deep, but calculated breaths and Sooyoung can feel it where they’re pressed against each other. She knows what Wendy’s doing: she’s helping her to regulate her breathing without the irritating counting bullshit people usually do. It’s nice of her, if a little unexpected.

Wendy’s still stroking her back, long and languid in time with her breathing. It’s different to how it was when Yerim did it. A little more reassuring, with a little more conviction. She doesn’t say anything either, which is nice. If only because Sooyoung doesn’t have to focus on working on a response and just has to focus on evening out her breathing.

It takes a while. A lot of minutes and even more breaths but she gets there. And her breaths are calm and her mind, while not _ good _ persay, is clearer. She has actual thoughts now, not just blind masses of emotions.

She eases herself up and convinces herself to look at Wendy. It’s a shock, to say the least.

Wendy looks genuinely worried, her eyes are wide in concern and her teeth are tearing into her bottom lip so hard that she’s broken the skin, and a few droplets of blood sit there. Her hands pause their movement and she looks into Sooyoung’s eyes carefully, searching for something. She must find it, because her gaze moves to the rest of Sooyoung’s face.

And Sooyoung’s abruptly reminded of how disgusting she looks, and how much worse she must look now. It doesn’t help that Wendy is looking effortlessly pretty as always, with her fluffy shoulder-length hair and deep brown eyes and being adorably swallowed by her mustard yellow jumper. She hates that Wendy looks so put-together when Sooyoung is falling apart. Sooyoung’s undoubtedly puffy and bloated and red-faced and she’s about to hide her face in her hands when she actually takes a good look at Wendy’s face and realises that she’s not bothered at all.

All she can see is stark care.

It’s not something she’s seen on Wendy’s face before and it’s shocking to think she’s capable of such emotion.

Wendy reaches up and with her thumb, grazes underneath Sooyoung’s eye to catch the tears on it. Sooyoung can barely feel the touch, it’s so faint.

Silence again, but the urge to _ know _ is painted across Wendy’s face so blatantly and Sooyoung knows that, despite being horribly curious, Wendy is waiting for her to speak first. She wants Sooyoung to be comfortable enough to break the silence.

Sooyoung opens her mouth.

But it’s difficult to admit to it. She closes her mouth again.

There’s so many things she needs to say ‒ so many things she needs to know. Both about herself and the weird mysterious girl looking at her with far too much concern.

There is one thing, though. One thing that takes priority.

“I told Yerim.”

It’s not what Wendy had been expecting.

“You fucking what?” There’s alarm stretching her eyes now, and she doesn’t remove her hands from where she’s holding Sooyoung, but she does freeze.

“She didn’t care.”

Silence again.

“I told her I killed someone and she just,” Sooyoung breathes in, “didn’t care.”

Her voice sounds so so weak, even to her own ears.

Wendy nods slowly in understanding and a small smile appears on her face. It’s not her normal smile, though. There’s something sad to it; there’s a ghost of her usual mirth in her eyes but, beyond that, nothing that Sooyoung recognises.

“Maybe I like Yerim more than I thought I did,” she muses quietly. But the way she says it ‒ it’s less like her normal snarky remark and more like it’s meant to be some sort of joke to lighten the atmosphere. If so, it kind of works but not really.

Sooyoung’s not sure anything could really lighten the spiral of darkness in her mind.

“But _ why _,” Sooyoung asks, eyes boring into Wendy’s now. As though Wendy holds all the answers. “How didn’t she care? I- we killed a man! Someone Yerim knew.”

“But she knows _ you _better,” Wendy says quietly. Sooyoung’s face must betray her confusion because Wendy continues. “Remember what I told you? About which of you I’d prefer to be dead?” Sooyoung nodded. “She probably thought the same thing. You’re her best friend, Sooyoung. One bad act doesn’t outweigh years of good ones.”

“But it _ should. _”

“Why?”

Sooyoung lets out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a scoff. “Because it’s not just a ‘bad act’ ‒ it’s fucking murder. That’s big. That ends lives and it should end friendships, too.”

Wendy shrugs half-heartedly. “Well, that’s a matter of opinion.”

“No. It’s not.”

Silence again, uncomfortable this time.

“Okay,” Sooyoung says, irritation lacing her tone, “Yerim doesn’t care because she cares more about me than Professor Miller ‒ sure. But what about you. Why do _ you _ not care? You actually killed someone you didn’t even fucking know and you’re just okay with it?”

“I am,” Wendy says, simply.

Incredulity and outrage replaces every other emotion Sooyoung is feeling. She stares at Wendy for a long moment, waiting for a _ sike! _or laughter or just something to indicate that she’s joking.

It doesn’t come.

“What.”

Wendy smiles, a small smile, like she’s finding Sooyoung’s disbelief endearing.

“It’s just murder,” Wendy says. “He was alive and now he’s not and that doesn’t impact me in any way.”

“But you killed him.”

Wendy shrugs.

“They’re right. You’re psychotic. You’re actually psychotic.”

Wendy’s smile widens. “Come now, Princess. I thought we were past name calling at this point.”

Sooyoung shakes her head, breathing deeply.

“Okay, let me ask you a question then, Sooyoung. Why do you care?”

Sooyoung splutters. “Are you asking me why I care that I murdered a man?”

“Yup.”

“Because it’s murder. I took away someone’s life and I did not have the rig-”

“No,” Wendy cuts her off. Her gaze is too piercing, too knowing when Sooyoung’s still struggling to think through her confusion. “Why do you _ actually _ care? And don’t give me some bullshit about how murder is wrong; I want to know why _ you _ care. You individually.”

Sooyoung opens and closes her mouth a few times. Because what else can she say. There’s nothing to explain. It’s murder and that’s why it’s wrong.

“Come on, Park. Don’t disappoint me. Not now. Not when I’ve waited this long to actually talk to you.”

Sooyoung doesn’t think to tell Wendy that she’s had ample time to talk to her because she’s still searching for a reason. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

Wendy smiles, as though this is what she wanted. “Do you feel guilty because you actually feel bad for what we did? Or are you only scared that we’ll get caught? If it’s the former then go to the police and turn yourself in. In fact, I’ll come with you.” Sooyoung hates how easily Wendy says all of this. “_ Or _ do you only feel guilty because you’ve been told your whole life that killing people is wrong but you can’t find a single shred of remorse in you. And that makes you scared of yourself.”

Sooyoung doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing she can say. She doesn’t like what Wendy’s said. Doesn’t like how right it sits in her chest. It’s like playing a _ Where’s Waldo? _and never seeing him, not for months. And then Wendy came along and told her where he was. And now she could never unsee it.

Now Wendy’s said that, she can never go back to a time she hadn’t heard it. And she just knows that she’ll never be able to forget it either. It’s knowledge she’ll always have and never be able to ignore.

She wishes Wendy had never said it. Wishes Wendy had kept the truth hidden. Wishes she could go back to before and spend her time pretending to be a decent person. Because how was she supposed to realise something like that about herself and then go back into society? How was she meant to face her friends? How was she meant to face herself?

“That’s not it,” she says and it’s so obviously a lie and both of them know it.

More than anything, she hates how casual Wendy was. She hates how blithely she shattered Sooyoung’s perception of herself. She hates how she still has that stupid fucking smile on her face.

And, like she can tell what Sooyoung’s thinking, Wendy says, “life stops being so difficult when you stop pretending to be a good person, Princess.”

She hates that she’s not actually angry at Wendy in the slightest. (Hates the relief she feels now that, maybe, she’s not alone in feeling this way.)

“Tell me he didn’t deserve it.”

Sooyoung can’t do that.

At her silence, Wendy’s smile grows to show off her teeth.

“You don’t have to feel bad about a repeat sexual offender being dead. There’s nothing wrong with you just because you don’t conform to society’s ideals of what right and wrong are. You don’t have to feel guilty.”

Wendy takes Sooyoung’s hands in hers.

“You don’t have to feel guilty. I certainly don’t. Morality is decided by the majority, of which I am not part.”

“Is that your way of saying that you're not like other girls? Are you trying to be edgy? Because, quite honestly, I think you achieved that when your response to killing a man was to laugh.” Sooyoung’s beginning to feel more comfortable in her own skin again, inexplicably.

Wendy grins, something fond in her eyes that's new to Sooyoung.

“No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the only reason the law exists is because a high proportion of people agreed on it and it's not my problem if my opinion doesn't align with theirs. That doesn't make me a bad person. That’s why democracy is a fundamentally flawed system of government- but that’s not the point right now.

Point is, you’re not a bad person because arbitrary concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ don’t exist because there’s no one to dictate what is right and wrong. Morality is subjective and you shouldn’t let other people influence your own views and make you feel bad about your opinions. At the end of the day, it’s as stupid as getting angry at someone for not having the same music taste as you.”

Sooyoung lets the words sink in.

It’s a new concept, entirely. And everything about it sounds wrong and it goes against everything Sooyoung has ever been told. But, she supposes, that’s kind of the point.

The horrible, horrible thing about it is that it makes sense. And Wendy sounds so sure of herself, so convinced by what she says. And Sooyoung finds herself _ wanting _ to believe in it, wanting to believe that she’s not a bad person, that she’s not wrong for not caring that Professor Miller is dead.

It’s easier to believe than it should be.

“I don’t feel guilty that I killed him,” she says finally, lifting her chin up.

Wendy’s grin is difficult to describe.

“There you go,” she says. “Knew you wouldn’t let me down, Princess.”

The nickname sounds ‒ feels ‒ different now, for some reason.

“See, sometimes it just takes killing someone to see the light,” Wendy laughs. It’s her nice laugh, the one that’s soft and airy and musical.

She still has more questions. Of course she does. And her newfound realisation just opens up so many more. But there’s one. One that seems random and stupid but she can’t stop herself from asking it. She needs to know.

“Wendy, why are you studying law?”

Wendy sits up a little straighter, withdraws into herself a little.

And Sooyoung sees the internal conflict. She sees Wendy pause and decide if she’s going to tell the truth. But Sooyoung’s shown Wendy all of her ugly parts, and maybe it’s time for Wendy to do the same. Wendy looks down, at where their hands are still intertwined. She begins to play with one of Sooyoung’s fingers and it’s the most nervous Sooyoung has ever seen her.

She looks up to meet Sooyoung’s gaze and it might the first time Wendy’s ever been anything near insecure.

“You really want to know?”

Sooyoung considers the question, because she supposes that she owes Wendy that much. It’s not too difficult to decide. Not when she’s wanted to unravel the truth about Wendy since she met her at that shitty house party over a year ago.

She nods.

Wendy takes a deep breath before she starts to speak.

“My mother was a police officer. She was obsessed with following the law, solving crimes ‒ all that shit. I didn’t think she’d ever done anything wrong in her life. She raised me right, she did. Dad was never in the picture but we didn’t need him. She had lots of rules and always carried that professional character of hers across to me. There wasn’t a distinction between Police Chief Son and Katherine Son, my mother. She was strict and I barely saw her but that was fine because she was making the world a better place.”

Wendy pauses, and looks like she might leave it there. But Sooyoung knows there’s more ‒ there has to be. She squeezes Wendy’s hands in encouragement.

“Then she was arrested. I was maybe eleven at the time? Embezzling, taking bribes, planting evidence ‒ all that kind of stuff. Maybe she helped with a murder or two.” She shrugs. “I’m not entirely sure; I didn’t go to the trial. It… kind of flipped my world upside down.” She says it like she’s never voiced it out before, never had to articulate it before. Sooyoung knows how that feels.

“But I was put into the foster system. The people who ran it were horrible. They enforced all these stupid rules and made us do everything for them. Most of the kids were bratty and entitled.” Her voice is bitter but faraway, like she’s not quite in the present any more. Sooyoung tightens her grip on her hands to remind her that she is. “Apart from Seulgi.” A small smile. “You met her, if you remember ‒ smoking with me behind the biology block. You probably don’t; you were pretty out of it at the time.

"But I hated there. So, so much. And it was all my mother’s fault. She put me there by not being a good person. And I hated her for it because I was suffering every single day because of choices she had made.” She’s angry now. “So I went to see her. I’m not even sure what I wanted from her, what she could do. An apology? Who knows? I went anyway.”

She looks up at Sooyoung, silently asking if she needs to continue. Sooyoung nods.

“So I went. And I was young and I was upset so I ripped my soul open right in front of her. I ripped it open and tore the pain she had caused me out of it. And I threw every single profanity and word of abuse that I knew at her. I hated her so much, Sooyoung. I really did.

And do you know what I saw?” Sooyoung shakes her head. Wendy smiles unhappily. “I saw that she didn’t care.” It feels familiar in that awful, haunting way déjà vu is. “I looked up at her, through tears and with my throat hurting beyond belief after shouting so much and saw nothing. She was emotionless.” Wendy’s voice is level, like she’s narrating another person’s life. “She was staring at her own daughter, distraught and angry and she felt nothing.”

A long silence and there was so much that Sooyoung wanted to say but she holds herself back. She could tell Wendy wasn’t finished. Not quite.

“But then I looked closer, hoping to see hidden compassion or some other bullshit like that. And I saw the slightest slither of emotion. The only slightest trace of anything other than apathy that I could see ‒ and, to be honest, I might have imagined it; part of me hopes I did ‒ but I could have sworn I saw amusement.

She found it funny. She thought it was one big joke ‒ a game. She didn’t even care that she’d been caught; that was all part of it for her. She just found it exciting.”

Wendy looks fully into Sooyoung’s eyes again and there’s no trace of that scared girl about to spill the secrets of her past. There’s something else, and it’s almost like she’s an entirely different person parading about in the skin of Wendy Son. And, Sooyoung realises, weakness and sadness weren’t what Wendy had been scared of showing her; this is. This unnerving glint in her eyes; the way her mouth twitches up in a way that looks like it hurts; the way her voice both deepens and rises when she says her next words

“And, now that I think about it, maybe it was a little funny.”

They stay that way for too long. With Wendy’s face too close to Sooyoung’s and Sooyoung desperately trying to reconcile all the different images of Wendy that she has into one.

For all the rumours about Wendy that flew around campus, Sooyoung was surprised that the truth had never been among them.

Wendy pulls away slightly, looking more like her usual self. But that doesn’t help Sooyoung erase the image she has in her mind.

“So I went into the most morally corrupt profession I could find: law. And I’m going to be good at it. And I’ll be corrupt and I’ll play with people’s lives and I won’t feel bad about it for a second. And if I want to take a case protecting some kid against the state, I’ll do that, too. As long as it’s what _ I _want. And honestly, what I want changes a lot. A lawyer unbound by law or morality or any bullshit like that. Just desire. That’s what I want.”

“Is that all you want?” Sooyoung asks quietly.

The look Wendy fixes her with is unreadable.

“No,” she says, looking deep into Sooyoung’s eyes. “I think I’ve found something else worth wanting.”

A few heartbeats pass, though Sooyoung’s sure that she’s skipped a few, before Wendy speaks again.

“It’s late. You want to stay over?”

It’s a bigger question than it seems and Sooyoung knows that. Her phone feels heavy in her pocket where she knows Yerim has definitely sent more than a thousand messages and calls. She shouldn’t disappear for the night. And the Princess of SMU definitely shouldn’t be spending the night at that weirdo Wendy Son’s flat.

“Yes,” she says.

“I’ll get some blankets,” Wendy says happily.

**___**

**December 1st**

Wendy cackles loudly as Sooyoung jolts at a jump scare.

“Shut up,” she grumbles.

“Aw, no! It was cute!” Wendy’s cheeks are tinged red from the wine.

It’s a shitty horror movie, but Sooyoung’s scared anyway. They’re on their third one of the night and it kind of sucks but Wendy seems to be enjoying it. She seems to like Sooyoung’s reactions more entertaining than the actual film and if Sooyoung’s ears are red because of that, she doesn’t mention it.

It’s nice being with Wendy, she’s discovered. With Wendy, there’s no pretences or secrets or pretending to be something she’s not.

It’s comfortable.

**___**

**December 3rd**

Wendy slugs her rucksack onto the table. Sooyoung looks up from her textbook to be met with a bright grin and feels one grow on her own face in response despite not knowing why Wendy’s so happy.

“What’s got you all excited?” she asks.

She can feel eyes boring at them from all directions. People haven’t quite gotten used to their friendship yet. Sooyoung can’t relate, not when friendship with Wendy ‒ and Seulgi, too ‒ has come to her so naturally. There are still new rumours about the pair of them daily and Sooyoung’s proud of herself that she hears them but doesn’t really listen.

“You are looking at the new lead singer for the Winter Showcase.”

“They let you in?!”

“I think they were worried I’d put a curse on them if they didn’t.”

Sooyoung stifles a laugh. “What, like you did to the football team?”

“Like I did to Professor Miller.” Wendy quirks an eyebrow.

“Oh right,” Sooyoung says, “I heard that one. Regardless, you deserve it. You’re going to show all those bitches up with your angelic singing voice.”

Wendy beams. “So I was thinking about what I should sing and I narrowed it down to-”

“No BeeGees,” Sooyoung cuts in.

Wendy pouts and Sooyoung’s almost inclined to give in. She manages to not relent, though, and Wendy lets out a petulant huff.

Sooyoung laughs, unrestrained and free. It’s a nice feeling.

**___**

**November 1st, 03:13**

Sooyoung upends the last of the potassium hydroxide into the open grave and then sits down, not even caring about the mud getting on her expensive jeans.

“It’ll take a while,” she says.

“I want to watch,” Wendy says. “Make sure it works.”

Sooyoung makes a gesture to say _ you do you _ and settles herself back on the grass. She tilts her head back, wincing at the click it makes.

An hour or so passes as they wait for nature to take care of Professor Miller’s body for them.

“It’s done.”

Sooyoung pushes herself to her feet and moves to stand at the edge of the grave. Professor Miller is gone. He’s been reduced to some coffee-coloured liquid with the consistency of motor-oil and smells strongly like ammonia.

That used to be a person.

Wendy surmises it pretty succinctly. “Gross.”

And, staring at the liquid that used to be her literature professor, Sooyoung stops seeing it as gross. She starts seeing it for what it really is: ingenious.

**___**

**December 17th**

Things with Yerim are more or less normal. They're not the same as they were before Halloween because how could they be? They couldn't possibly go back to before ‒ not when Sooyoung has changed her entire world view.

Maybe it's a little awkward because Yerim doesn’t understand. It’s not the same sort of awkwardness that it was before, when Sooyoung was keeping her secret. It’s awkward because they’re both very different people now.

Yerim says she can’t recognise Sooyoung any more. Sooyoung says this is what she’s always been like, deep down. Yerim calls bullshit.

“You’re throwing your life down the drain! Have you heard the shit people are saying about you?”

“So you don’t care about murder but you do care about popularity? Come on, Yerim!”

“That’s not what this is about, Sooyoung.”

“Sure it isn’t.”

Okay, so maybe things aren’t normal. They’re actually very tense. But it’s not all bad. Mainly because Sooyoung knows they’ll be fine.

That’s the thing about friends from first grade; it takes more than murder to get rid of them.

**___**

**December 21st**

The auditorium is decorated prettily. Or, well, as prettily as the arts’ department budget would allow.

Basically it means there are fairy lights draped on the walls and large paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling. There are silver balloons tied in bunches in each of the corners and patches of fake snow strewn around the floor. All in all, not bad.

She finds a seat easily next to Seulgi and soon enough, the lights dim and the host walks onto the stage.

  


Wendy, as the lead singer, closes the entire show. So Sooyoung and Seulgi wait patiently and clap along at all the other acts even though they know all of them will pale in comparison to Wendy.

Sooyoung’s brought a bouquet, and Seulgi has a box of chocolates. Wendy’ll like them.

Wendy walks out onto the stage and emerges under a single white spotlight. Sooyoung gasps and dutifully ignores Seulgi’s snigger.

It’s not her fault; Wendy is breathtaking.

A long, flowing white dress trails behind her as she makes her way to the microphone standing at centre-stage. The light is harsh, but cascades gently onto to her to illuminate her softly but still let her shine. Sooyoung’s heart stutters in her chest. Wendy’s hair is pulled back into a loose, low ponytail so that only a few strands of hair frame her face. And, as cliché as it sounds, Sooyoung can think of no other way to describe her than as an angel.

The song starts, an instrumental piano introduction and Wendy’s eyes flutter closed. She opens her mouth and sings.

  


When the showcase finishes, the lights come back on and everyone begins looking for whoever they came to see. Sooyoung and Seulgi are no different.

They scour the hall and it’s easy to spot Wendy. When she looks so ethereal she stands out and there’s a good three metre radius around her that’s clear of people as everyone else avoids her and Sooyoung laughs at it.

They make eye contact and Wendy walks forward and lets Sooyoung pull her into a hug. They stay like that for a few moments and would remain that way for longer, but Seulgi forces them apart so she can hug Wendy herself.

Seulgi congratulates Wendy, spewing praise after praise and Wendy takes them all with superfluous _ thank you’ _s and shy giggles. Then Seulgi spots someone else she knows and goes off to wish them a well done, telling them she’ll be back in a moment so they can all go out for dinner.

Wendy’s eyes follow her friends off before they settle on Sooyoung.

“You were really good,” Sooyoung says earnestly, offering the bouquet.

Wendy takes it with a sweet smile. “Thanks for coming.”

“Seriously amazing. The most heavenly thing I’ve ever heard.”

She steps closer, and there’s only the bouquet between them now. And Sooyoung’s hoping that she hasn’t just been imagining it all. She’s hoping it hasn’t just been all in her head. Wendy’s looking up at her, understanding coming into her eyes.

“You’re beautiful.”

“You’re one to talk.”

**___**

**2 years ago**

She remembers it. The first time she’d ever heard Wendy’s name.

Yerim had told her about how everyone was saying that this girl ‒ Wendy Son ‒ had flooded the bathroom at one of the dorms to get back at a girl who stole her socks by accident. And Sooyoung had laughed, because it was ridiculous and she’d heard worse things about herself, even if they weren’t quite as weird.

But suddenly, after that, she had heard Wendy’s name everywhere.

She heard it whispered in conversations when she walked past freshmen and she saw it in her group chat notifications. Wendy Son had become a part of her life almost overnight, in such a strange way.

Rumours about this strange enigma of a girl were almost addictive to Sooyoung. It was nice, she argued, to have a comrade in the rumour mill, even as they stood at opposite sides of the spectrum and ran in entirely different circles.

Maybe there was something else to it, but it didn’t matter.

Wendy Son was a story and nothing more. She was built from hushed words and mixtures of truths and lies.

She was barely even a real person.

**___**

**December 21st**

Sooyoung lets her gaze drop to Wendy’s lips and linger for a moment before meeting her eyes again.

Wendy smiles, that one that makes her look just a little wicked and Sooyoung revels in the way her heart constricts.

“What are you waiting for, Park?”

Sooyoung doesn’t dignify that with an answer, leaning down just as Wendy pushes herself onto her tiptoes. Their lips meet in the middle, and one of Sooyoung’s hands comes up to frame Wendy’s face while the other rests on her waist.

Distantly, she hears the bouquet drop to the floor a moment before she feels Wendy’s arms come up to wrap around her neck. Their lips move languidly against each other. It doesn’t feel like a first kiss; it feels like something familiar but still loving and _ good. _

Sooyoung doesn’t even feel the people looking at them, let alone care that they are.

When they pull apart for air, she rests her forehead against Wendy’s and grins at her. Wendy does the same. It doesn’t feel like they’re in a crowded hall. It just feels like it’s the two of them. They’re not Sooyoung Park, campus IT girl and Wendy Son, the aggressive loon. They’re just them. And that’s enough.

“About time, Princess.”

“Oh, shut up, Freak.”

“Make me.”

**___**

**December 21st**

“I heard you got yourself a girlfriend.”

Sooyoung’s just got back from dinner, and she’s already being interrogated. Fantastic.

“And what about it?”

“Wendy Son?” Yerim says incredulously. “Are you kidding me? That psycho? This explains why you’ve been acting so weird lately ‒ I _ knew _ something was wrong.”

“Yeah, I killed a man and it kind of messed me up.”

“You know that’s not what I meant. Can’t you see, Sooyoung, she’s weird. She’s, like, corrupting you or something.”

“She’s not,” Sooyoung grits out.

“And how do you know? I heard-”

“I don’t really give a shit about what you heard, Yerim. Can you please stop listening to and caring about bullshit rumours and start listening to me: your best friend.”

Yerim looks like she wants to argue but she closes her mouth and looks at Sooyoung expectantly.

“I like her. So much, Yerim. She makes me so happy and none of those rumours are true and you have to know that. Can you please be happy for me? Even if you don’t like her, can you respect my choice? Can you respect my feelings?” She sounds tired. “I’m done with fighting with you; I’m tired of being awkward. I miss my best friend.”

“Is that not Wendy?” Yerim bites out but Sooyoung smiles because it sounds far more whiny than accusatory.

“No one could ever replace you, Yerim. You know that.”

And that’s the thing about best friends since first grade, Sooyoung thinks as she hugs Yerim tight against her chest. Maybe they don’t share the same world views and opinions about morality and whatnot. But that’s okay. Because there are things that are stronger, more important.

“You want to meet her?”

She feels Yerim nod and can’t help the grin that spreads on her face.

**___**

**December 23rd**

“Where are the gummy worms?” Wendy ponders aloud, running her finger along the assortment of sweet packets on display at the convenience store.

Sooyoung scans her eyes along and spots them on the top shelf. A small sense of triumph ripples through her as she snatches them and holds them above her head.

“Right above your head, shortie,” she sing-songs, laughing at the scowl Wendy gives her.

“Put them in the basket, Park,” she says.

“Nope,” Sooyoung pops the _ p. _ “Give me a kiss and maybe I’ll think about it.”

“No.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to jump for them.”

Knowing Wendy, it shouldn’t surprise her when she does actually jump, but it does anyway. Sooyoung laughs and lifts it even higher as Wendy resolutely jumps, face impossibly serious for how stupid she looks leaping into the air to grab a packet of gummy worms.

“Well, Wendy Son and Sooyoung Park, if this isn’t a surprise.”

Both of them whip around to see Detective Joohyun Bae. Something cold runs down Sooyoung’s spine and she immediately drops the sweet packet into the basket.

She prowls towards them, and Sooyoung seizes Wendy’s hand with her own, gripping it tightly.

“I thought you said you two were just friends,” she says, eyes dropping to their interlocked hands. Sooyoung feels Wendy squeeze even tighter.

“Things change, Joohyun,” Wendy says smoothly.

“Detective Bae,” she corrects.

“You’re off-duty.”

The two of them stare at each other for a long moment, and the tension is so thick in the air Sooyoung can hardly breathe.

“I know it was you two,” Joohyun says suddenly. And Sooyoung feels her blood turn to ice in her veins. “I don’t know how, but I know it was. I will find something ‒ one shred of evidence ‒ and it will be enough to bring you both down, I promise.”

It’s not the words themselves which frighten Sooyoung, but rather the conviction with which she says them, the certainty in her eyes.

Silence fills the empty space between them.

“We should get back to shopping,” Wendy says coldly and she pulls Sooyoung away by their joined hands.

**___**

**December 24th**

The news is on but Sooyoung’s not really paying attention to it. It’s not really an option when Wendy’s on her bed and she’s got her tongue in her mouth.

But then-

_ “Today, there’s been a breakthrough in the almost two-month-old case of the disappearance of SMU’s Professor Richard Miller.” _

The two of them jerk away from each other to stare at the TV, faces pictures of shock. Joohyun’s words ring in their heads.

_ “In a large field approximately thirty minutes from the university's campus, a silver lighter believed to be Professor Miller’s has been found.” _

**___**

**November 1st**

Sooyoung finally, _ finally _ gets to take the lighter out of her pocket where it’s been burning all night.

It’s a fancy thing, engraved with his initials and other senseless, ostentatious embellishments. She clicks it open and strikes a fire on her first try. It’s a good lighter.

She closes it again and wipes it down with her sleeve, looking at her reflection for a moment.

She looks at where Wendy is standing to her left and then back at the make-shift bonfire they’ve built, complete with all Professor Miller’s inorganic possessions.

She strikes a flame again, and tosses it onto the pile.

**___**

**December 24th**

They stare at the TV for a few more moments, before the story changes to some protest in New York.

Sooyung turns to face Wendy only to find that her girlfriend is already looking at her. They smile at each other.

“You cleaned your fingerprints off it, yeah babe?”

Sooyoung shrugs and presses her lips against Wendy’s.

**Author's Note:**

> just one more time: please do not murder people  
i also want to just say that i acc love the beegees and abba and do not agree with the musical opinions expressed in this fic lol
> 
> if you made it all the way to the end, thank you very very much! i really hope you enjoyed it!!
> 
> this is the first thing ive ever tried to write with this type of tone and, to my prompter especially, i hope it didnt disappoint
> 
> hit me up on [twt](https://mobile.twitter.com/whatisanult) or [cc ](https://curiouscat.me/whatisanult)
> 
> please validate me by leaving kudos and comments; they make me very happy 
> 
> thank you <33


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